Waiting Room

"Ever since her husband's death collided with the birth of her daughter, postpartum depression has taken hold of Veronica Shelton. She can't sleep, can't work, and can't bear to touch her beautiful baby girl. Her emotional state is whispering lies in Veronica's ear: You're a bad mother. Your baby would be better off without you. But not everything can be reasoned away by Veronica's despair--can it?"--Dust jacket flap.

The Waiting Room captures the sights, sounds, accents and animosities of a country overflowing with stories. Dina is a family doctor living in the melting-pot city of Haifa, Israel. Born in Australia in a Jewish enclave of Melbourne to Holocaust survivors, Dina left behind a childhood marred by misery and the tragedies of the past to build a new life for herself in the Promised Land. After starting a family of her own, she finds her life falling apart beneath the demands of her eccentric patients, a marriage starting to fray, the ever-present threat of terrorist attack and the ghost of her mother, haunting her with memories that Dina would prefer to leave on the other side of the world. Leah Kaminsky plumbs the depths of her characters’ memories, both the sweet and the heart-wrenching, reaching back in a single climactic day through six decades and across three continents to uncover a truth that could save Dina’s sanity – and her life.

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

Mary Morris, the acclaimed author of Nothing to Declare, the remarkable journal of a woman traveling alone, now brings us an absorbing and evocative novel of healing and forgiveness, love and war. THE WAITING ROOM is the intricate tale of three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by the essential experience of all women, that of waiting—for love to grow stronger, for wars to end, for life to move ahead. In its richly woven texture, its movements through time and space, the novel introduces us to the unforgettable members of the Coleman family: Zoe, who returns home after years away to confront her brother Badger’s break with reality—the result of taking too many drugs in Canada, where he fled to avoid the Vietnam War; June, Zoe’s mother, who first suffered a deep estrangement from her husband when he returned from World War II; and Naomi, the grandmother, who fled the pogroms of Russia. From the Home on the Road Motel to Badger’s residence at the austere Heartland Clinic, from the plains of the Midwest to the swamps of Florida, three women confront men, madness, dreams, and ultimately one another. Filled with humor and the wisdom of generations, THE WAITING ROOM is a novel of hope in the face of loss, of war and its casualties. It is also about freeing oneself from the dark side of waiting, and escaping into the light of love. Written in a magical, almost fablelike manner, and with the inimitable humor that informs the fiction of Mary Morris, THE WAITING ROOM fulfills the promise of Morris’ earlier work, which, from the start, has distinguished the author as a unique American voice.

THE STORY: A dark comedy about the timeless quest for beauty--and its cost. Three women from different centuries meet in a modern doctor's waiting room. Forgiveness From Heaven is an eighteenth-century Chinese woman whose bound feet are causing her

With wry humor and sharp insight, Waiting Room examines medical ethics and compassion in critical situations.

The Waiting Room is about the importance of relationships from a Christian perspective. Written with the perfect blend of compassion, love, humor, and wisdom, it compels us to “stand in the gap” for the betterment of our loved ones. With each season of life, our relationships are constantly defining who we are and who we can become. The influence of our relationships can profoundly affect the quality of our lives. All of us are involved in some type of relationship. Whether it’s the family-unit relationship, marriage relationship, coworker relationship, or all other relationships in-between; there is a common thread that connects us. With each chapter, we are reminded that relationships are the cornerstones of life. We are inspired to be more attentive and purposeful as we relate to one another. The Waiting Room insightfully reveals how God wants us to become the active force of unconditional love, compassion, and patience in our relationships as we journey through life together.