Book Review: kaleidosope dream

By Terri L. French
Red Moon Press
Winchester, Virginia
2025, paperback, 136 pages
ISBN: 978-958408-56-8
$20 USD
Ordering Information

Reviewed by Kristen Lindquist

I was first captivated by Terri L. French’s haibun several years ago when she was a featured reader at Wild Graces, an annual haiku gathering in southern New Hampshire hosted by the editor of Akitsu Quarterly, Robin White. This may have been the first time I heard haibun read aloud, and Terri’s reading from her book Keepers, for which she channeled an 11-year-old boy named J.T. Blankenship, gave me a strong sense of both the form’s narrative possibilities and French’s abilities as an empathic storyteller.

Her most recent collection, kaleidoscope dream, doesn’t disappoint in either regard. As each turn of a kaleidoscope rearranges the fragments inside, creating unique and beautiful patterns, so too do these haibun feature an assortment of colorful characters. And while the pattern one sees in a kaleidoscope differs each time, each is similarly repetitive, a mandala, of sorts—most fitting for a book with has a thread of Buddhist spirit running through it.

The 55 haibun in this collection (plus two tanka prose) follow a traditional pattern: a block or blocks of poetic prose punctuated and/or capped by haiku. The book itself is structured without parts, each haibun followed by a stand-along haiku on its own page that resonates with the preceding piece. So the emphasis here is on story rather than form. The risks French takes are with the heart, as she demonstrates over and over how to create a deeply personal narrative that captures perfectly the emotional complexities of being human.

And being human isn’t easy. French’s haibun portray the gamut of social woes: poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, child abuse, mental illness, marital strife, religious hypocrisy, homelessness, and the alienation of youth. A beloved teacher dies from drinking too much. A father-in-law kills a litter of newborn puppies. A son ends up in jail, again. An apparently bipolar friend commits suicide. French writes from within these stories with unforced sincerity, as one who has really lived them. And when you read them, you can hear her own voice telling them to you, via her genial tone, attention to detail, and characteristic warmth.

Describing this collection in such a way may make it sound intense. But French’s empathy with her characters—especially children—elevates her haibun so that each glows with its own quirky beauty. She seems to have taken to heart one of her own haiku: “some babble / worth listening to— / mountain brook.” She listens to the “babble” of those who are often overlooked and ignored: a young homeless man; a waiter in the Buddhist restaurant; a Gullah basket-weaver. The down-and-out are pushed to the forefront. In “escar-gone,” for example, we learn that a woman can’t bear to have shells in her house because she fears they might contain her sins. In “86ed,” a man who used to be “our favorite server/bartender at our favorite restaurant” wastes away alone in a group home. Following a humorous senryu, the haibun “baubles,” narrated by a mentally ill person who may have been sexually abused by her father, becomes even more wrenching. And the narrator of “the pleasantest thing” is a swing lamenting the loss of its girl through the passing of time.

But French’s sense of humor shines throughout even the darkest stories. A haibun about an elderly woman who reuses each tea bag four times in one day is cleverly titled “tedium.” (The aforementioned “escar-gone” also exemplifies how a serious topic can be made accessible with a humorous title.) In “sentient being,” she ironically refrains from killing a stink bug perched atop her bronze statue of Guanyin, goddess of compassion and mercy. And in “of messiahs and single malts,” she details a Jewish friend’s belief that he met Jesus at a bar:

I’m talking to my Jewish friend and he says he thinks he met Jesus at a bar in Huntsville, Alabama. “So,” he says, “I’m sitting at the bar and I ask the bartender the price difference between these two beers. And this burly lumberjack of a guy with long brown hair and a beard sitting next to me turns and, in a very low, gentle voice says, ‘Hey man, if there’s a problem I’ll buy your beer.’ I mean he doesn’t know me from, well, Adam, ya know?” “Wow,” I say, “that was really nice of him.” ”Yeah,” he agrees, “so we get to shooting the shit and he says he was an engineer but wanted out of corporate America. So now he’s a tree trimmer—a tree trimmer!” “Seems to fit the Jesus bio,” I say. “And all of the workers there—most of them migrants—just gravitated to the guy. They all had to pat him on the back when they walked by, like they just wanted to touch him, ya know?” “Wow,” I say again, “so what happened?” ”I called my sister and told her ‘I met Jesus!’” A sigh. ”Now she’s afraid I’m born-again.”

three-day bender
a miracle
I'm still alive

Each of French’s haibun in this collection is thus a new twist of the kaleidoscope, offering up to the reader a quick glimpse of someone’s life—including her own. The arc of kaleidoscope dream progresses somewhat chronologically through glimpses of her childhood, first marriage, and experiences with her own children, to later travel and RV life with her second husband. French kicks off that narrative arc with her first haibun, which takes place before she was born:

fuzzy dice

Mama, if only you hadn’t worn that pink angora sweater the day you met him in the school parking lot, cutting your Home-Ec class and forever forfeiting the knowledge of whether the salad fork went on the inside or the outside.

If only you hadn’t gotten into that red ’57 Chevy that he called baby more then he called you baby, the one you helped Turtle Wax every Sunday after church.

Mama, if only you hadn’t stopped at that spot at the end of that dirt road near that abandoned house covered in honeysuckle vine, the sweet smell seeping in through the rolled down windows.

little angel 
a milkweed seed caught
in a sunbeam

This is a haibun of regret that shares an age-old story: a young couple who are wrong for each other end up together because of an unintended pregnancy. The image of “fuzzy dice” puts us inside the ’57 Chevy with the teens but also hints at chance or (bad) luck. Yet all “Mama” misses out on is how to properly set a table, no tragedy. And the conception of her “little angel” was blessed by the scent of honeysuckle. The reader chuckles knowingly, for that “little angel” is probably telling this story. So if she “hadn’t,” the writer wouldn’t exist, a delightful ambivalence that further softens the edges of this family drama.

The book ends on an intriguing note with the final haibun, “asherah’s song.” Asherah was an ancient Semitic fertility goddess, a divine mother. So the book ends on a timeless note of motherhood:

asherah’s song

There’s an underground world in the forest. A world of secrets, spells, incantations and whispered truths that spread like rumor. One whose evidence man can walk through but never know. Take off your shoes, stay awhile. If you feel its stirrings you have been bestowed the greatest gift. Leave the forest its disciple, signing praises and spreading the gospel written by roots. One day, it will all be myth. A bedtime story told to the last child.

bristlecone pine—
putting new laces in
dad’s old boots

This haibun in particular stuck with me long after reading the book, in part because it is different from everything that comes before it—maybe the only haibun in second-person, for one—and in part because of its intriguing haiku, which speaks of no less a mystery than the cycle of life. The book’s final stand-alone haiku, which follows on the facing page, underscores this timeless quality: “forest bathing / an old sorrow / starts to loosen.” We may find an answer to the human condition, to all the “sorrows” shared in the preceding haibun, beyond humanity, in the forest.

These two haibun, the alpha and omega of the collection, book-end a true kaleidoscope of stories, one that is a pleasure to look through again and again. Each time, I come away with a new perspective on what it means to be human—and with a renewed admiration for Terri French’s haibun craftsmanship.

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About the Reviewer

Kristen Lindquist is a frequent book reviewer and the coordinator of the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Haibun. Her books include island (2023, Red Moon Press), which won second place in the 2024 HSA Merit Book Awards, and It Always Comes Back, winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award. She lives in Midcoast Maine. Read more: kristenlindquist.com/blog.

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