First Time Listener explores the ramped up 21st century digitalization of the social world, while reaching back to the most ancient of manuscript cultures. In Part 1, all is queried: Gilgamesh, God, the Cloud, the Bible, Bob Dylan, technologies of the book, and CNN’s Crimes of the Century. Part 2, Retrospective of the North in Gold, turns contemplative, reading the colours and astrological signs of the digital and urban 21st century worlds. The book concludes with Lost Time, an ambitious long poem that maps Zilm's girlhood in Surrey—located on the south bank of the Fraser River in Metro Vancouver—onto Proust’s Combray, exploring cracks in the interesections of class, sex, gender, and language.

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.

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