“Best make friends with your lonesome…”

That’s Woodrow talking. Before he shoved off or was taken away. Before he fell and forgot how to use the phone.

“Woodrow’s a man after my own heart,” says the author. “I was born in ’46, Woodrow in ’34. We’re both dogs on the Chinese astral chart. Of course, we had business to conduct.”

Alone, with groceries is the work of a man passing through.

Made up of motel notes & box scores on a nightstand pad, these dispatches sing of the desert and the songs of a missing friend. What lurks behind these poems is the passage of a man’s life mirrored in another’s, from birthright to breakdown and the thirst for absolution—the need for it and the calling it by other names. Woodrow says it’s the best book Peterson ever wrote and he’ll fight any man who says different.

Peterson is 72 and lives on a fixed income. He takes cream in his coffee and admits to finding dealing with others a burden. He’s published scrolls of necromancy from which certain lines are construed as prescient. He considers his life cloistered and has served one god though it felt like many.