Clothes To Go Out In

by Margaret Chula

Clothes To Go Out In is a collection of haibun, a hybrid form combining prose with haiku. These thirty-one vignettes weave together a tapestry of Chula’s life—from clothes for all occasions to a collage of memories, experiences, and emotions that have shaped her identity. Both humorous and somber, the haibun in Clothes To Go Out In show us “how light and shadow are part of the same fabric, and the line between them is filled with wonder.”

Enjoy a video of Margaret reading from her new book:

Early Praise:

In Maggie Chula’s new collection of haibun, Clothes To Go Out In, she shares both love and loss in deeply sensory images. We meet hostile dream-ghost dolls, empathize with a fake philodendron, experience moments from world travels—Manila, Tibet, Montreal, Japan—and more. Linking all these poems are remembered clothes and fabrics: from the dusky rose satin dressing gown she “rescued” from a laundromat to the clothing her father and mother wore to go out in after death. These haibun, with their precise prose and startling leaps of haiku and tanka, are akin to colorful garments pinned together on a clothesline—often subtly linking to one another like renga verses. A wonder-full read!

—Penny Harter, author of Keeping Time: Haibun for the Journey

In Clothes To Go Out In, Maggie Chula invites readers to accompany her in recollections of a life fully engaged—days of budding promise, of loss and poignancy, of mysterious dreams and random acts of kindness. Readers meet the ten-year-old marble champion cradling her cat’s-eye; the young woman filled with rapture upon discovering a silk dressing gown; the world traveler finding vintage clothing in Kyoto flea markets or roaming monasteries and burial sites in Tibet; the experienced poet remembering lost loved ones and days once filled with “the taste of summer/ when everything/ was in living color.” With a clear eye and clear language, she digs below those bright colors to show how light and shadow are part of the same fabric, and the line between them is filled with wonder.

—Rich Youmans, editor of contemporary haibun online

Like traditional Japanese haibun, the haibun in Clothes To Go Out In do their quiet work through the clear language of distilled prose combined with their attendant haiku that shape each story with a further revelation—gently, or whimsically, or with a sharp sting. A mother’s deathbed, Emily Dickinson’s white dress, the homeless man in a parking lot, the synesthesia of a memory. The two forms resonate with each other in a subtle journey of re-imagining. Chula is a storyteller, songstress, seer.

—Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers

About the Author

Born in Northfield, Massachusetts, Margaret Chula has traveled overland through Asia, lived in England and Japan, and now makes her home on the Portland skyline. She has published fifteen collections of poetry including, most recently, Weeding the Labyrinth. Her haibun memoir, Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyoto, was awarded a 2022 NYC Big Book Award in Multicultural Nonfiction. Maggie has given readings and lead workshops at haiku conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Poland, Ireland, Peru, Canada, and Japan. She has also served as poet laureate for Friends of Chamber Music, president of the Tanka Society of America, and on the Advisory Board of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. Grants from Oregon Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council have supported collaborations with artists, musicians, photographers, and dancers. Kim Stafford says of her work: “She has long been a word shaman connecting the wild world to the human heart.”

 

 

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