Bøger udgivet af Odeon Press

Maya Marinovich has lost her husband and baby daughter in a freak car crash. To find a new start, Maya leaves Boston for San Francisco. She gets involved briefly, but passionately, with the leader of a Japanese-Jewish cult movement. Next, she lands a job as assistant property manager for The Bon Vivants, a group of artists in a co-housing building in Oakland. Later she learns details about the accident and spirals into depression and thoughts of suicide. In the final chapters, Maya meets Buddhist teachers Eli Ronen and his wife Reva, and begins a lifelong process of healing and transformation, finding meaning through helping others.

Three kids rob a diner in Greenfield where everyone knows them. A boy goes to the Big E in West Springfield and runs away with the circus. An animal control officer has to shoot a moose in Sheffield. A ghost still roams the flooded and sunken town of Enfield. A prep school teacher in Old Deerfield reenacts the raid of 1704 with his students, to disastrous results. These deceptively simple fictional stories share two commonalities-first, each one ends in the name of a town that ends in "field"--Ashfield, Northfield, Plainfield, and so forth. Second, most of the stories contain a crime, or something like one, but this is not a crime novel. It's an exploration of this magical landscape in the Pioneer Valley (or slightly beyond), populated not by magicians or wizards but by very real human beings; it's a portrait of a changing world and the men and women who inhabit it: hardy, independent, passionate, hardheaded, sometimes a little crazy.

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