The Waiting Room Reader: Words to Keep You Company

by Roxanne Hoffman

From the “This book, the second in the Waiting Room Reader series, grows from the belief of its visionary originators, Joan Cusack Handler, director of CavanKerry Press, and Sandra O. Gold, president of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine, that one good thing to be able to pay attention to in waiting rooms is poetry. This is a belief that I, as guest editor of this volume, emphatically share. Poems with staying power are always themselves acts of attentiveness, and reading any good poem both demands and rewards attention. The job, then, is to make sure poems can be found in waiting rooms, where they will always be needed. All the works in this collection (primarily poems but also a handful of short prose pieces) enact longing and memory; they recall, they evoke, they praise. The writing of just about every piece in this book turns out to have been an act of reclamation, an evocation of some lost original, which isn’t so lost after all. “The pieces gathered here touch upon themes poets have always memory, family, love, loss, nature. Voices and styles naturally and delightfully vary; some pieces are chiseled and succinct, others loose and rhapsodic. But all, in addition to being accomplished, share the generosity and intensity of their attention to a particular piece of experience.” Among the contributors are Robin Behn, Maxine Kumin, Molly Peacock, Linda Pastan, Liz Rosenberg, Elizabeth Spires, and Jeffrey Harrison.

152 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Roxanne Hoffman worked on Wall Street, now answers a patient hotline. Her words can be found in cyberspace ("IndieFeed: Performance Poetry," "Pedestal Magazine," "New Verse News"); set to music (David Morneau’s "Love Songs"); on the silver screen (2005 indie flick "Love and the Vampire"); in print ("The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates" (Soft Skull Press), "It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure" (Harper Perennial). She and Jack Cooper run Poets Wear Prada. Her elegiac poem "In Loving Memory," illustrated by Edward Odwitt, was released in 2011.

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