The Ambulance Box
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Ron Butlin, the current Edinburgh makar, has chosen The Ambulance Box as one of his books of the year in today’s Sunday Herald. (The piece doesn’t seem to be online so I can’t link to it.) Recommending it alongside Brian McCabe’s Zero, Tom Pow’s Dear Alice and Polly Clark’s intimate and powerful Farewell My Lovely,
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On Facebook at the moment, you can vote for what you think is the most important book Salt has published. It’s a fascinating list. At the moment, Shaindel Beers is way out in front and looking unassailable. (Well done, Shaindel! It is a strong book.) Of course, importance is deeply subjective but that’s half the
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The front page of Salt’s website now carries a top 20 bestsellers list and I’m delighted to say that The Ambulance Box currently comes in at 11, just above Keats (!). Here are the top 10: Tania Hershman, The White Road and Other Stories Chris Agee, Next to Nothing Shaindel Beers, A Brief History of
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There were some strained moments last week on the Ambulance Box tour bus after the driver nearly fell asleep at the wheel in the Swiss Alps and the tour manager’s navigation nearly had us in Luxembourg rather than heading Londonward. But nobody has actually fallen out or off and, today, we reach our final stop
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The Ambulance Box tour bus nears the end of its journey this week as I pull into Switzerland and the blog of poet, academic and musician Andrew Shields. Andrew is a tough questioner! But I enjoyed it. Click here to read his questions to me about Scots and German, my poetics and lists.
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If a disadvantage of touring virtually is that you don’t get long stretches of reading time on trains or planes, one advantage is certainly the ability to skip back and forth over huge stretches of ocean and land as if you had a little nut tree. Accordingly, this week finds me back in the USA
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Unoccupied as I am and have been, I’ve added another date to the Ambulance Box virtual tour: on 5 August, I’ll be at fellow Salt poet Anne Berkeley‘s blog Squared.
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Others may be going on a summer holiday, but here at Tonguefire the Ambulance Box virtual tour bus keeps chugging along. It’s a remarkable engine, managing to pull me over the Atlantic and back in a week with barely a dampened spark plug to speak of. Today, it pulls into Cadwallender, the eponymous blog of
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The first print review of The Ambulance Box is in! It’s part of a piece in Magma 44, where Rosie Shepperd reviews it alongside Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (Carcanet) and River Wolton’s The Purpose of Your Visit (Smith/Doorstop Books). The review is thorough and extremely positive. Here’s a headline quote: delights readers with a dance
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My Cyclone virtual book tour skips over the Atlantic today to stop in Ojai, California at poet Robert Peake’s blog. Thanks to the wonders of Skype and Robert’s technical know-how, you can see and hear us discuss the surprises of publication; language; the music of poetry; the importance of the page; and grief and hope.
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Just back online after my trip to London for the Lemon Monkey reading (a fanstastic evening of which more anon) and a brief computer hiatus enforced by redecorating. All of which leaves me with two tour stops to catch up on. First of all, on Monday, as Rob Mackenzie and I sped southwards on the
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Today’s tour stop is at the blog of Dundee-born artist Douglas Robertson. Doug has turned our chat via Facebook messages into a fine post about my sequence of “Hebridean Thumbnails”, incorporating the poems themselves and beautiful, deft sketches he has created to accompany them. I say it’s about the sequence, but that’s really only the
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Whoops! I’ve got a day behind myself in posting the links to my Cylone virtual book tour. Thankfully, Claire Askew is on the ball and posted her interview with me on her One Night Stanzas blog yesterday as advertised. Drop by and read about how I became a writer, how I got from my first
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This week, the Ambulance Box virtual book tour stops off at Fiona Veitch Smith‘s fine blog The Crafty Writer, a rich resource of information about the craft and business of writing. Click here to read my poem “Lullaby”, our discussion of writing as therapy, the marketing of writing in Scots, getting your poetry published and
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Lifting the Lid: the Ambulance Box virtual book tour gets under way today over at Our sweet old etcetera … the blog of the Scottish Poetry Library. Pop by and read about my earliest influences, Weebles, my writing methods and more besides.
Amy Jo Philip 