What These Hands Remember

Margaret Koger is at once a songbird and a seamstress as she weaves a tapestry of art and language, stitching sacred stories of tender-bellied song. What These Hands Remember collects love and nature into poems, almost a prayer for life's quiet moments, as Koger discovers beauty in the daily and hope in the small wonders. Her work captures the passing seasons in life, in the garden, and throughout generations, infusing images of flowers, wrinkles, hands, leaves. Each piece offers a snapshot much like a camera lens zooming closer, nearer, until we witness the heart's truest beats of love, family, and home.

-Rebecca Evans, co-editor of when there are nine and co-host of Radio Boise's Writer to Writer



In What These Hands Remember, Margaret Koger's luminous poems reveal the world in all its tenderness-carnations that smell like pepper, hollyhock dolls, praying herons, camellia corsages. "Inside I'm still that lithe little sapling I was many moons long ago," the poet writes, and we can tell because we feel her wonder on every page. Wisdom here is passed down not only from generation to generation but from poet to reader, which is our great good fortune.

-Kerri Webster, author of We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, Grand & Arsenal, Trailhead, and Lapis, and Visiting Poet in Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, MFA Program at Boise State University



In Margaret Koger's What These Hands Remember, some of what you will find: Poems that poke, evoke, probe; rise like hot air balloons. Apples. Cats. Crisp moments about coming of age. You'll find hogs and loss; a rural life long gone. Gardens and work and Grandmas and Mothers and kids and pies and family; feasts. A reader's feast.

-Ken Rodgers, author of The Gods of Angkor Wat and co-producer of Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor and I Married the War