“As a poet and the mother of an Army Reservist, Margaret Rozga took to heart many quiet and unquiet moments in her response to her son’s deployments, first to Iraq where he was injured and later to Afghanistan. She moves from musing to engage with feelings and images that stay with us. The result of turning to poetry in her time of sadness, worry, concern, and relief evokes truth and offers release.”
— Sheila Bender, whose books include A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief and Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from your Life Experience

“I’ve long admired the worldliness of Margaret Rozga’s poems, her ability to show us readers how what may not seem immediately to touch us can touch us immediately. And, while many wear what we call ‘social conscience’ proudly as a chosen garment now and then, it runs so much deeper in Margaret Rozga; it’s who she is.”
— J.D. Whitney, author of All My Relations and Grandmother Says

“The poems in Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad throb with the anxiety of those left behind: mother, lover, friend. They are finely tuned to the fractures in daily life when a child is at war, when a child is wounded in war—how language itself stutters through fear and grief. As we mark ten years at war—wars most of us prefer to forget—Peggy Rozga’s striking poems tell us, Look. Here. This is the true cost of war. Here.”
— Sarah Browning, director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden

“In one of the first poems in Margaret Rozga’s new collection, Though I Haven’t Been To Baghdad, her comparison of her son’s pronunciation of Iraq (Eye rack), a place he’s seen in combat, with her pronunciation (Ear rock), a place she can only imagine, rings true. Though questions of grammar won’t make the war go away, she employs the dependable rules of punctuation and tense she knows so well to parse the chaos that is her son’s world, where there are no easy answers. It is her diligent attempt to piece together what can’t be explained that gives her poems their authenticity.”
—Frances Richey, The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War