Mailbox Monday — December 22

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week. It is now being hosted at the Mailbox Monday blog.

Here’s what I added to the shelves:

For review:

Joy Street by Laura Foley — from the author

Each poem in this radiantly plainspoken collection offers subtle and penetrating observations that swell to a rich tapestry of ordinary life, beheld from a stance of grace and buoyancy. Starting with intimations of desire in childhood, these poems travel through ordinary domestic scenes to the blessing of a maturity in which the narrator, still embracing desire and wild promise, thrives in the midst of life’s darker gifts. This collection is truly a joy to read. It puts to shame those of us who walk through our days with “the din of loneliness,” ignoring life’s many invitations for bliss. (publisher’s summary)

Unexpected arrival:

The Valley by John Renehan — from Dutton

There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths.  But there was only one Valley.  Black didn’t even know its proper name.  But he knew about the Valley.  It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.  It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans has ventured.  You had to travel through a network of interlinked valley, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth.  Stories circulated periodically, tales of land claimed and fought for, or lost and overrun, new attempts made or turned back, outposts abandoned and reclaimed.  They were impossible to verify.  Everything about the Valley was myth and rumor.

The strung-out platoon Black finds after traveling deep into the heart of the Valley, and the illumination of the dark secrets accumulated during month after month fighting and dying in defense of an indefensible piece of land, provide a portrait of men at war reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, Restrepo, The Yellow Birds, and Matterhorn.  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

© 2014 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.