Steppingstones

Steppingstones is Margaret Kogan's third book of poetry, bringing together haiku, tanka, and brief lyric poems shaped by close attention and a steady Zen practice.The poems move between the intimate and the expansive: climate change and public grief; a sapling surviving winter; sparrows, honeysuckle, rain, and fireflies; the changing body; memory, mortality, and fifty-nine years of marriage. Brooklyn streets and Prospect Park become places of observation and practice, where ordinary life is considered alongside suffering, impermanence, humor, and love.Throughout the collection, Kogan asks what a poem can do in dark times. Her answer is to keep paying attention-to what changes, what passes, what remains, and what makes a shared life. Direct and spare, Steppingstones is a meditation on presence, companionship, and the daily practice of being alive.