Ariadne’s Notes: On August 18th, CFRO 100.5 FM, The World Poetry Café Plus welcomed Kim Fu whose unique creative voice is outstanding, Mixing humour and darkness with irony, her poetry is both compelling and fascinating. She was our second poet from Nightwood Editions and deserves a featured spot here . Kim will be participating in WORD and we hope to meet her then. World Poetry will be celebrating the poetry and music of Korea at WORD. Music from Don Amero and Andy Vine.
TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW: CLICK HERE!
Kim Fu is a Canadian-born writer living in Seattle, WA.
Her debut novel FOR TODAY I AM A BOY (2014) was the winner of the Edmund White Award, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and long-listed for Canada Reads, among other honors.
Her first poetry collection HOW FESTIVE THE AMBULANCE (2016)
includes a Best Canadian Poetry selection and poems originally published in Grain, Room, PRISM International, Carousel, Ricepaper, Numero Cinq, Poetry is Dead, and The Rusty Toque.
Fu’s nonfiction credits include The Atlantic, NPR Books, The Rumpus, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, and republication in Best Canadian Essays.
Fu has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. For 2015-16, she has received residency fellowships from Berton House (Dawson City, YK), the Ucross Foundation (Ucross, WY), Wildacres (Little Switzerland, NC), and the Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts (Eastend, SK).
At the poet party
we talk about all the poets
who committed suicide.
The comparative merit
of stones in a pocket
over the gas oven.
“She didn’t want to leave
her children alone,” we say.
“But she did.”
We imply
as modern poets,
we are made of sterner,
less sentimental stuff.
We can weather the draft
through a crack in the bricks,
the presence or absence
of children or fame.
When one of us
commits suicide,
we say he was ill,
not a poet.
