Bio:
Called the "Haiku Queen of Portland” by the Willamette Week, Margaret Chula has been writing Japanese poetry for thirty-five years. Her haiku have appeared in journals worldwide, on Tokyo train station billboards, at a construction site for the Orange Line in Portland, and on cans of Itoen tea sold in vending machines in Japan. She has published seven collections of poetry including Grinding my ink and Shadow Lines, which received Haiku Society of America national book awards. Her free verse poems have appeared in Briarcliff Review, Prairie Schooner, VoiceCatcher, Sufi Magazine, Kyoto Journal, Cloudbank, Windfall, and West Marin Review. Maggie currently serves as Poet Laureate of Friends of Chamber Music and as President of the Tanka Society of America. Visit her online. 

Just This  
Margaret Chula’s tanka convey contemporary moments located in the tradition of classical waka, the earlier form of tanka. The book contains the traditional number of one hundred tanka, and each section of the book begins with a classical waka translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani.  The poems in this Just This range from the poignant to the humorous and offer glimpses into what it means to celebrate, to love, to grieve, and ultimately to embrace the complexities of being human. They clearly demonstrate why Chula is one of the foremost practitioners of Japanese poetic forms writing today.

 "Margaret Chula's tanka are deeply enriched and informed by her study of their Japanese ancestors, yet remain distinctly American and her distinctly her own, the product of genuine cross-cultural pollination. Subtle, compassionate, wonder-filled, these are poems of endearing insight and revelation." - Sam Hamill 
"I have read poetry for years, with Wendell Berry making a major impact on me in college, but I've never had such an immediate connection to a set of poems as I did reading Just This." - James Falzone, composer