Brady Peterson’s new book of poetry, shows us, again, his ability to find language that is accessible and yet demands that we linger—and return—to find meaning. His poetry reminds us of the hold of memory. It reminds us that love makes loss so much harder. Yet, love allows us to walk through the pain to what light there may be. Peterson’s search for that light is a gift.
- Myra McLarey, Water from the Well
In Brady Peterson’s deeply evocative poems, myth meets memory as the poet revisits key moments in an otherwise ordinary life and sets them in the context of eternity. Such moments are connected by the most fragile of membranes, the thin line that divides past from present, dream from reality, who we once were from whom we’ve become. Each poem moves us, step by step, station by station–and through the spaces in between–along the journey towards joy the searching soul seeks. Between Stations is where life happens. What luck to find a poet brave enough to take us there.
- Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems
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
From a room in central Texas, Brady Peterson resolves the mystery of time: Why does history fail us? Do we remember what we remember? His poems are well-crafted eternities where history is ever present, the title itself linking us to Ginsberg, Whitman, and García Lorca. London remains suspended between wars, Orwell wanders Paris, and Vietnam continues to break America. Ghosts stay alive. To paraphrase Brodsky on Auden, Brady has lived long enough to master the vocabulary of his life. Poetry is how he lives. No other poet is writing like this. An excellent book.
- Mark Cannon, poet and day worker
García Lorca Is Somewhere in Produce
$15.00
“There are many things to love about these new poems by Brady Peterson—the invitation to break bread & drink wine on Fisherman’s Wharf; to lie awake & listen to the house asleep as ‘a light rain salts the metal roof;’ to roam the streets of Paris with Rilke chasing angels; to follow a boy home from a New Year’s Eve party, his pockets stuffed with the shoes of the pretty girl he danced with. The rare places the poet takes us are places of the mind, both remembered and imagined, conjured at his writing desk or in the plastic lawn chair from which he surveys and transforms the world. These are visionary poems wherein ordinary objects and events of everyday life shimmer and shine in all their earthy beauty. Van Gogh once wrote, ‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’ Peterson practices this profligate love, teaching the reader to fall in love, too. To read these poems is to savor and see the holiness of the homely world.”
~ Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage and Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor