From an Upstairs Window

"Brady Peterson invites you into his poems as if you were a close friend-bridging the difference between writer and reader. He looks out his window, sips his morning coffee, and sees not only what is there but (to borrow from Norman Mclean) also notices what is not there-what is remembered and what was forgotten. This collection is his best work yet. Myra McLarey, The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble "Brady Peterson is a poet of the moment-the once, the always, and the never again. From an Upstairs Window, he narrates a world populated by lost fathers and mourned daughters, singing the song of the rip saw and the Kingsman, of tequila and coffee and the stolen kiss, watching the Confederate Army march across a field, his great-grandsire among them, seeing himself navigate the dangerous terrain of memory ghosted by poets who sing their own songs (Lorca, Whitman, Sexton, Pound). But Peterson's poems don't keep their distance from the shocks and sorrows that make a life. Instead, they drive us straight into the country of mystery, the spaces and places where the veil is thin, where you can nearly touch the other side, so bright does the past burn, so loud does the present beckon. This is how we touch, how we remember, the poet writes, in this luminous world of things." Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Still Pilgrim