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Poetry. Take a seat in WAITING ROOM, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm. Featuring a melange 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 he
About the author
JENNIFER ZILM received a B.A. and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of British Columbia and was a doctoral fellow at McMaster University, where her (unfinished) dissertation focused on the liturgical and poetic texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. A graduate of Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio and the Humber College School for Writers, Zilm's writing has been published in numerous journals, including
Prism International,
Prairie Fire,
Grain,
CV2,
The Antigonish Review,
Vallum, and
Women in Judaism and Poetry. Zilm has been a finalist for many contests, including The
Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award and
CV2's 2-Day Poem Contest. She is based in Vancouver, BC.
