I have always admired Maggie Chula for not only her poetry, but also her sense of adventure and personal flair. This well-traveled and cultured poet has undertaken a two-week silent meditation in a Sri Lankan monastery, lived in a bamboo pondok on a Balinese artist’s compound, and resided and taught in the outskirts of Kyoto.

But, in her latest book, Clothes To Go Out In, the author takes us back before all that. She stitches together memories, dreams, and experiences into 31 haibun and tanka prose pieces that, through images, symbols, fabrics, and textures, create a story quilt of poignant moments in her life.

Various themes run throughout the book. One, of course, is clothing—a whole closetful, from a satin dressing gown the author finds at a laundromat (inducing images of her strutting around like Lauren Bacall) to, in the title piece, the outfit that Chula wishes her mother could have worn before being cremated. (“I wish I had been there to dress her in a cashmere sweater and wool pants, to wrap a matching scarf around her neck … I would have slipped on a pair of soft slippers so she could go lightly into the next world.”) Other themes that run throughout the book are childhood, family, death, dreams, and birds. The following tanka prose includes many of them.

Dream Catcher



I’m at a friend’s house. Her daughter climbs a ladder and takes down a birdhouse. A chickadee, a bluebird, and a wren fly out. When she opens the back exit, an owl emerges, blinking in the sunlight. He flutters slowly to the ground. I kneel down, and he allows me to pet him with both hands. His feathers are gray and soft, like fur. Large yellow eyes hold my gaze as he tells me what I need to hear. When I awaken, I can’t remember a word he said.

cleaning out
my dead sister’s closet—
among hatboxes
shoes and fur coats
Mother’s ceramic owl

What is it, we are left to wonder, that the owl has said? I can only speculate. Perhaps it told her what she needed to hear from her mother, who (as recounted in the haibun “Shark’s Tooth”) “hated dirty things, like the shark’s tooth and animal bones and skulls I’d brought home as a child.” This brings up another of the book’s running themes, cleanliness versus dirtiness. This antithesis can be vividly seen in her haibun “Mud Dreams,” in which this time the dream is of a muddy pond filled with corpses “like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.”

I’m standing behind a man who is built like Paul Bunyan but dressed in the armor of a warrior. I’m in his shadow and he doesn’t see me. Other people approach but flee once they see what’s in the pond.

After they disappear, the warrior gives a signal and slowly, one by one, the faces begin to move. Arms grope through mud, feet stand. The corpses emerge from the pond like a black army. They will kill me as soon as they see me—the outsider—the only other clean person besides their commander. Do I jump into the pond and cover myself with mud or do I stay clean and be killed? The leader senses someone behind him and turns around.

from mud
the white lotus and I
turn toward morning

The haibun “Spots” speaks again to this idea, and the need to make things clean.

All my life, I have tried to make things clean. Washing popsicle sticks to build houses in the sand, sweeping up ashes from burnt-up wood, polishing Mother’s silverware, cleaning blood spots off the floor after my roommate slit her wrists. I called the ambulance to save her when all she wanted to do was die. It’s all your fault, she yelled as I wrapped my arms around her. And when they had taken her away, I spit out my anger in the immaculate kitchen sink.

again, that metallic taste
the doorknob I licked
to make it shine

Such poems are heartbreaking, Others, however, are hopeful and even whimsical. In “Philodendron” we are introduced to a fake plant that’s “next to the trash bin in the women’s restroom of the ARCO gas station in Philomath, Oregon.” The plant is dirty and seen as worthless, yet looks forward to the day it goes to the landfill and can “finally put down roots.” Even in the hardest circumstances, hope remains—as Chula makes clear in the capping haiku:

again she pitches
her tent on the sidewalk
dandelions in the cracks

The last piece in the book, “Encounter, 1969,” also ends on an auspicious note.

when I was seven

I found a whole patch

of four-leaf clovers—

that day I knew

I’d always be lucky

And we readers are also lucky to have such a deeply honest, engaging, and talented poet share her words with us.

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About the Reviewer

Terri L. French is a poet/writer and retired massage therapist. For the past four and a half years, she and her husband, Ray, have enjoyed the nomadic life of full-time RVers and are now building their forever home on a mountain in Huntsville, Alabama. Her newest book of haibun is kaleidoscope dream (Red Moon Press).