Thrilled to have received 3rd Place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for 2025 (for books published in 2024) for Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press, 2024)
Judges' commentary:
"In Arctic Dreams the biologist Barry Lopez wrote that landscape shapes our imagination. Debbie Strange has lived in western Canada all her life where her sense of place has been finely honed; so too are her haiku that come from this lived experience. With amazingly precise and beautiful language Strange writes of the "undersong of a thrush," "the iridescent sound of morning," and the "grace notes" of a meadowlark. She writes of a landscape of coulees, auroras, and parhelions. The natural world comes alive in her haiku where we meet capelin, orcas, thunderbugs, scarlet tanagers, witches' butter, puffballs, trilliums, and almost-white tundra hares. Each treated with clear, yet surprisingly fresh language. You've probably met a woolly aphid or two in your backyard, but from the title poem ("dead orchard / the random blue sparks / of woolly aphids") you'll learn they sometimes come in blue. The book itself produced by Snapshot Press is a pleasure to hold and to read.
firelight knitting another length of silence
marsh reeds
we learn the secret
language of wind
(note: I have corrected a couple of errors in the H.S.A. website release of the commentary)
—Scott Mason & Patricia J. Machmiller
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