CBC Books Spring 2016 Books Preview Selection

49th Shelf Most Anticipated Spring 2016 Poetry Selection

Take a seat in (the) Waiting Room, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm.

Featuring a mélange 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.

Watch the BookThug Author Interview with Jennifer Zilm:

Listen to the Book Launch:

Watch the Book Launch and Reading:

Praise for Waiting Room:

“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, author of Oscar of Between

“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, author of Chorus of Mushrooms

“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, author of The Outer Harbour: Stories

“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

Reviews:

“What makes this collection so compelling is not only the range of structures within, but in seeing Zilm’s openness, as we see her attempting to understand some of the broad range of possibilities that poetry has to offer. ” —rob mclennan, The Small Press Book Review

“For a first book, Waiting Room demonstrates Jennifer Zilm’s already strong talent & insight.”
—Douglas Barbour, Eclectic Ruckus

“The collection is aptly titled–these poems tell of the time between, the time before, the time after.” —David Nilsen, Fourth and Sycamore

“One recent book of poetry that discusses money with rare honesty is Jennifer Zilm’s debut, Waiting Room (2016). Zilm’s poems provide insight into a world where our unequal access to wealth is perhaps the most important factor in determining how we live—or if we live at all.” —Aaron Giovannone, The Walrus

“As a librarian and word etymologist, Zilm challenges the reader to consider her choices on both a grammatical and phonemic level, and it’s this attention to the politics and materiality of language that codify the poem and provide it with genuine subtextual complexity.” —Phillip Crymble, Hamilton Arts and Letters

“Waiting Room is a cabinet of curiosities. A v. witty one.” —She Does the City

“Zilm’s is a sharp, searching intelligence that draws mystery from her strange mixtures. A layered, complex, unique debut.” —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

“Waiting Room is compelling, gripping, and familiar. It is a valuable contribution to the documentary tradition in Canadian poetry because it works to reveal the subject waiting to be uncovered in the document.” —Ryan J. Cox, Canadian Literature

“Zilm encourages readers to engage a bit more than normal in the activity of reading. She dares readers to find beauty in the leftover and the unfinished, in the margins.” —Geoffrey Nilson, CV2

Profiles and Interviews:

The Entitled Interview with Jennifer Zilm —Open Book Toronto

On Deck: 5 Authors on the Books They Can’t Wait to Read This Summer —49th Shelf

Poetry In Transit: Interview with Jennifer Zilm —The Buzzer blog

Under the Cover: Waiting Room, the Tour —All Lit Up

12 or 20 Questions with Jennifer Zilm —rob mclennan’s blog

Vancouver-based 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 is the author of two chapbooks: The whole and broken yellows (2013) and October Notebook (2015). Zilm has been a finalist for many contests, including The Malahat Review‘s Far Horizons Award and CV2‘s 2-Day Poem Contest. A draft of Waiting Room was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Waiting Room is her debut book of poetry. Learn more at www.jenniferzilm.com.