Kim Fu

February 15th, 2016

Her debut collection of poems How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood $18.95) is filled with incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence. Despite the word pyrotechnics, these poems shed light on small scenes of domestic life and banal tragedies of modern love and modern death. They follow upon Fu’s gender-bending first novel For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins 2014) set in a small town in Ontario to heighten the pressures already felt by her protagonist, Peter Huang, the only son born to a traditional Chinese family. Feeling he ought to have been born female, Peter is deeply estranged from his Chinese name, Juan Chaun, meaning powerful king, as he endures bullies, harsh lovers and Christian ex-gays. Peter and his three sisters, Adele, Helen and Bonnie, all flee to less suffocating lives in Montreal, California and Berlin. Born in Vancouver and a graduate of UBC’s Creative Writing program, Fu has been published in Maisonneuve, The Rumpus, Ms. Magazine, The Tyee, Prairie Fire, The Stranger, Grain, Room, and Best Canadian Essays. She is an editor for This magazine and writes the advice column ASK FU! for the YourBoxClub.com blog. She lives in Seattle, Washington.  978-0-88971-321-5

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