Waiting Room

Poetry. Take a seat in WAITING ROOM, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm. Featuring a m lange of styles and forms (including sonnets, erasures, unsent emails, footnotes, session notes, CVs, tweets, and other disparate source materials), Zilm's engaging and observant writing invites readers to investigate the curious boundaries of various therapeutic terrains--from an exploration of the esoteric world of graduate school, where the subject is religion, to a mash-up of Dante's vision of purgatory and Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES), to the improbable written intersections of van Gogh's doctors and Sylvia Plath's therapist-subverting, sharing, and repurposing the all-too-familiar vocabularies of psychiatry, dentistry, the Bible, and academia in a humorous investigation into what it means to wait, to be a patient and to be patient, to be a student and to be a teacher, to be a healer and to be healed.

"From dental work to theological discourse, WAITING ROOM enthralled me. Zilm's 'salient' lines leap or spring with poignancy. She deeply attends to the urgency and meaning of the poem on every level and it's rare. Brava "--Betsy Warland

"Zilm's first collection of poetry is a layered experience; intelligent, stimulating, structurally precise, shot through with a slightly sardonic (but not embittered) sense of humour. Ranging from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the language of Psychiatry (its own kind of religion), Zilm pushes text and textuality, exploring art, life, theory and mortality. What a virtuoso performance."--Hiromi Goto

"Jennifer Zilm's WAITING ROOM is incantatory and incandescent. Like Brian Wilson's assertion of the song as a pocket symphony, Zilm's poetic lyrics are pocket epics. It is our collective ambivalence toward the transcendent that is her subject, whether the hope we hold onto comes in the form of luminous study or fluorescent pathology. These are the poems of our times and you will rise into the aether within them."--Wayde Compton

"Jennifer Zilm has written a book as adept with form as it is rooted in conceit. Zilm impresses both intellectually and aesthetically, crafting work that refuses relegation to a single category. This poet espouses quirk, but only as path to devastating affect. An occasional sonnet glitters in a playful prose poem matrix; true biblical scholarship becomes a moving reflection upon identity, love, and beauty; oh, and Vincent van Gogh goes mad. Disorder haunts WAITING ROOM, a cunningly ordered sequence that will be one of the most unique titles published in 2016."--Shane Neilson