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Harlot, by Jill Alexander Essbaum
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Harlot Website

Few poets’ roots go deeper than the Romantics; Jill Alexander Essbaum’s reach all the way to the Elizabethans. In her Harlot one hears Herbert and Wyatt and Donne, their parallax view of religion as sex and sex as religion, their delight in sin, their smirking penitence, their penchant for the conceit, their riddles and fables, their fondling and squeezing of language. But this “postulant in the Church of the Kiss” is a twenty-first century woman, a “strange woman” less bowed to confession than hell-bent on fairly bragging of threesomes and more complications than were wet-dreamt of in Mr. W. H.’s philosophy.
—H. L. Hix


A collection aptly named—a Harlot in the truest sense—every poem a payoff in fleshy delight, palpable, nearly tasty and never a schoolgirl fumble or flop. Her unyielding talent for using language - and using it until it is red and sore—gives the reader an understanding of a poem's bones without exposing all of its secrets. Its sounds are real and guttural; the subjects are equally heady and addicting. Essbaum's talent for turning "tricks" has earned her an intense collection of poetry that swims and shimmers and sears before it demands cash. Worth it every time.
—Molly Arden