Bøger af Angélique Jamail

One's Animal Affinity is a sign of maturity and worth; Elsa's inability to demonstrate hers has become dangerous. She fears the wolf packs prowling her neighborhood and being stuck in a lackluster life. Fortunately, her cousin and a co-worker can see through to what society won't. Includes illustrations and book group discussion guide.

Raqia, a teenage girl who immigrated to Texas from Lebanon as a toddler, has felt the subtle pang of loneliness most of her life: she has no siblings, and her widowed father stayed behind when Raqia and her grandmother left Beirut to escape dangerous wolf packs terrorizing the city. These wolves were not just animals, however. They were also people. Homecoming is set in a present-day world where one's Animal Affinity emerges, usually during adolescence, to signal one's burgeoning into adulthood. Raqia and her two best friends, Anabelle and Eddie, navigate homecoming at their high school while the threatening undercurrent of wolf packs encroaches around their city. Complicating all of this are two things: first, charismatic Eddie himself is a wolf--though not, he claims, associated with one of the gangs engaging in violent criminal behavior; second, Anabelle's emotional swings grow more wild as one of the girls begins to evince her Animal Affinity. The balance between this trio--and the friendships which matter in Raqia's life--are on the cusp of an irrevocable shift.

This is a book of stories as much as a collection of poems. In it, the characters swerve between the rain-drenched, tree-lined, concrete plains of Houston and the voluptuous, dynamic terrain of Los Angeles. They face multiple realities, and though they're earnestly grounded, they sometimes swim in the waters of magic realism. Their story is both relatable and a little bit surreal. "For Jamail, loss is the fecund territory complicated by the travails of geographic movement, emotional upheaval, and cultural dissonance and where the poetry sings its best."-- Sarah Cortez, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials (editor and contributor) "The Sharp Edges of Water is a collection of superbly crafted poems…poems of faith and freeways, of lies and longing. Angélique sees the details of Los Angeles and love, with a necessity of details we locals have forgotten. As the title implies, you might get wet reading them. Wear appropriate clothing."-- Rick Lupert, author of Beautiful Mistakes and God Wrestler, creator of www.PoetrySuperHighway.com