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.

Jennifer Zilm has done time in libraries, social housing and detoxes. She is the author of the two previous collections Waiting Room (Book*hug, 2016) which was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and The Missing Field (Guernica Editions, 2018) which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.