“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
