Haunting and elegant, Hausfrau is the exceptional debut novel from the prize-winning American poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum. Anna was a good wife, mostly . . . Anna Benz lives in comfort and affluence with her husband and three young children in Dietlikon, a picture-perfect suburb of Zurich. Anna, an American expat, has chosen this life far from home; but, despite its tranquility and order, inside she is falling apart. Feeling adrift and unable to connect with her husband or his family; with the fellow expatriates who try to befriend her; or even, increasingly, her own thoughts and emotions, Anna attempts to assert her agency in the only way that makes sense to her: by engaging in short-lived but intense sexual affairs. But adultery, too, has its own morality, and when Anna finds herself crossing a line, she will set off a terrible chain of events that ends in unspeakable tragedy. As her life crashes down around her, Anna must then discover where one must go when there is no going back . . .

Discover your own wisdom about your grief. Every loss "deserves a fitting grief," Jill Alexander Essbaum assures us in The Good Grief Journal. From that beginning, she 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 ten meditations in this journal corresponds to a stage of grief as outlined in Granger E. Westberg's classic book Good Grief, published in 1968. Millions of people have found in it validation for their grief, understanding of their feelings, and a way to live through grief and into hope.Every meditation is followed by prompts and questions designed to help readers reflect more deeply on both the nature and effects of their loss. Scripture passages, poems, and quotes from a variety of sages and artists offer further inspiration for this journey of discovery.The meditations and prompts in this journal are intentionally nonspecific. They are adaptable to suit both the nature of the loss as well as the needs of the grieving person.

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