Embark on a powerful journey through the darkness into the beauty and peace of the light. Told with poignant, passionate prose that seems like conversational poetry and reflects universal themes of love, life, sorrow, joy and gratitude, AN AFFAIR IN THE VALLEY: A COLLECTION OF POEMS forms a powerful and moving testament to the world with her great people. Echoing author Steve Jackson's journey through hardship and darkness, this exquisite collection explores both the dark and the light, from sorrow to rapture, and his ascent to a place of peace. Steve sees the light because he's felt the darkness, living for months out of his pickup with no end in sight. But through this, he was liberated and delivered to witness the beauty of life around him, a life where people climb from sorrow's abyss to stand on love's common ground, the world, home in the stars. AN AFFAIR IN THE VALLEY is passionate poetry about openings, opening the door to home, to the greatness of a strong heart with room for others and strength to share laughter and tears. These thoughts and stories have been scraped off the wall of Steve's everyday life and carefully sifted through an exquisite prism of awareness. Steve sees the morning because he's lived through and felt the darkness. He's heard a hundred silent doors slam behind him. But there is no bitterness here. His conversational poetry is an accessible, glowing testament of a conscientious witness with an uncanny knack for isolating precise words and the exact inflection of a moment, which he freezes into language that allows a reader to extract poetry's purest essence. If Dante's Inferno is a guided descent into the hideous abyss, AN AFFAIR IN THE VALLEY: A COLLECTION OF POEMS is the reverse, an ascendance into light and the lightness of being, an affirmation that "This is your home, the universe. The universe loves you." MAINCREST MEDIA REVIEW An Affair in the Valley by Steve Jackson is an uplifting collection of poems that present a captivating portrait of growth and inspiration. An Affair in the Valley follows the life and the struggle of a singular, recurring speaker. Readers are ushered into the book with a strong sense that these poems were inspired by Jackson's life. The book's vignette-like poems feature numerous characters that the speaker encounters along the way- family, friends, lovers and strangers. At the hands of these characters or by what Jackson might call Fate or the Universe, he experiences abandonment, betrayal, grace, homelessness, limitless love, and an abundance of other twists and turns which ultimately shape the speaker's evolution through life. Throughout the collection, Jackson also chronicles the similarly turbulent experiences of many of those other characters as well. The poems in An Affair in the Valley explore the duality of suffering and deliverance. Jackson paints a profound image of a man who has experienced unimaginable suffering. He refuses to shy away from the dissonance between how painful and how beautiful the world can be at the same time. He embraces the paradox of life. Jackson's secondary themes emphasize the role of unconditional love and self-acceptance in one's journey from darkness into the light, images which recur throughout several of his poems. An Affair in the Valley's thematic substance is, by far, the collection's stand out feature. Without making any off-putting assertions, it tugs at bigger questions, and seems to imply that there is universal quality to human experience that is bigger than all of us; it includes the love, the loss, heartache, joy and everything in between. Jackson finds the right moments throughout the book to demonstrate his proficiency writing in a more traditional poetic voice, but most of his poems adopt a more narrative approach. Many of them contain quite a bit of dialogue and are driven by different characters, the way in which they have touched the speaker's life and the way he has touched theirs. This unique stylistic choice presents itself as a strength in Jackson's poems. His style of poetry lends itself to his ability to tell a larger, interconnected, cohesive story about the speaker's life and experience. The collection is grounded by a kind of chronolgy- an arc- not especially common in collections of poetry. In addition, when he embraces the fractured and the abstract, we can sense that there is a deep sense of intentionality behind the different approaches. The hybrid style of poetry casts a wide net and will appeal to a wider audience of readers. In An Affair in the Valley , Jackson's unique voice shines through loud and clear- enough so that we have no trouble hearing the compelling, beautiful message it declares. -Maincrest Media Elite Authors Review Poet Steve Jackson's writing in AN AFFAIR IN THE VALLEY reads like a love letter to joy, pain, relationships of all sorts, and the truth that what connects us in this human experience is complex and deeper than any ocean. Mo