Nick Cave Reads Harlot

No Tell Books' first celebrity endorsement!


Nick Cave reading Jill Alexander Essbaum's Harlot.

From Dan Chiasson's review of The Best American Erotic Poems in The New York Times:

If you find yourself in a book with an orchid on the cover, its petal languid and its pistil looking ready for action, it is really best to have written an anti-erotic poem like A. R. Ammons’s bleak two-line “Their Sex Life” (“One failure on / Top of another”) or Jill Alexander Essbaum’s funny “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica” (“She stood before him wearing only pantries / and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze”).

For all you folks getting here in your search for "On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica," I would be remiss not to point you to Jill's newest book: Harlot (No Tell Books, 2007).

It has a very naughty cover.

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the guest poet at Poets.org for January/February:

I believe in the body. The body of work, the body of the poem, the body of Christ, and the best of all bodies, the human body. I mention this because in addition to being unashamedly religious, my poems are also, well, unashamed. Critics and former colleagues alike have hinted at the Donne-esque impulses in my work. Whether or not that’s a comparison I deserve is another story. But the truth is that the Christian tradition is ripe with flesh-conscious apologists. Even the words we use to describe religious experience—the passion, the ecstasy, the rapture—sound less like a Sunday service and more like a roll in the hay. When I write my more erotic poems, the bespoken-of Lover is sometimes a person, sometimes God. In my better poems, the Lover is both. In my professional experience (and forgive the categorizing), the Christian reader has an easier time dealing with the sexual nature of my work than a purely secular reader has embracing the Christo-centric poems.

Jill Alexander Essbaum No Tell Books Release Party - December 1 - Reston, VA

(with rambling Reb intro)

Recent No Tell Book Reviews

Going Postal: Rebecca Loudon's Radish King and Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home

Reviewed by Caroline Ashby at Cutbank

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Chris Purdom reviews Harlot

Available at Lulu Now!

Harlot, by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Available at Lulu NOW
Available at Amazon and B&N SOON



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

Harlot by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Coming this October

Cover Art: Cynthia Large
Cover Design: Meghan Punschke

Contemplating Jesus

100% Dynamite Photos - Jill Alexander Essbaum Edition

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with Fritz Ward


with Dan Nester