Books by Jill Alexander Essbaum

As the title of this gorgeous collection suggests, Would-Land is an adventure in wordplay and the discoveries of our heart- and hearth-truths that language (in its inevitable slippage) can reveal. And the slips of both language and self are what''s at stake here. Oscillating between elegiac and epigrammatic, Essbaum''s poems share at once the ecstasies of sound and syncopation of a modern-day Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the acerbic insights of a more sensuous Dorothy Parker, with a little of Emily Dickinson''s taut ferocity for the sublime thrown in. Love, loss, coupling, uncoupling, coupleting, incompleting, faith, forgiveness-all of this and more is explored in these poems which are both gut-wrenching in their candor and lavish in their language. I am an unrepentant fan.
-Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, An Index

From that beginning of this work, the author offers a path for those who grieve, whether the loss is from a physical death, a looming divorce, declining health, bankruptcy, or some other wound. Each of the 10 meditations in this journal corresponds to a stage of grief as outlined in Granger Westberg's classic book "Good Grief."

Hausfrau is the exceptional debut novel from the prize-winning American poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum. 'The Book that will have everyone talking' CosmopolitanAnna Benz, an American in her late-thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno - a banker - and their three young children, in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zurich.Though she leads a comfortable life, she is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with Bruno, or even her own feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises her.But she soon finds that she can't easily extract herself from these relationships. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back . . .