Random Blue Sparks
Random Blue Sparks - a haiku collection released by Snapshot Press on December 30, 2024
Winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press Book Awards
I'm beyond honoured to announce that my book-length haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks, winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press Book Award, was published by the press on December 30, 2024. Thank you to John Barlow for selecting and sequencing these poems, and to Chuck Brickley for his valuable insights. I'm also grateful to Chuck Brickley, Ron Moss, and Tom Clausen for their generous blurbs. Special thanks to my husband, Larry, who is my first reader and second pair of eyes.
Praise for Random Blue Sparks:
'Debbie Strange's first full-length collection of haiku offers a stunning display of sensory artistry inspired by the landscapes and ecosystems of Western Canada. Random Blue Sparks is a wonderfully vibrant gathering of moments to savour.'
—Chuck Brickley
Author, earthshine
'From finely tuned observations of the tiniest life forms to quiet reverence for open landscapes of earth and sky, this brilliant collection is a timely reminder of the relevance of nature haiku in today's climate.'
—Ron C. Moss
Author, The Bone Carver
'Illuminating the essence of experiences and things, Random Blue Sparks is a compelling love letter to the prairies, mountains and waters of the western provinces of Canada. These indelible haiku brim with poetic joie de vivre.'
—Tom Clausen
Author, Growing Late
Haiku
stormlight
a pronghorn outruns
the rain
meadowlarks
the grace notes that follow
me home
weaving light
into this day of mourning . . .
damselflies
submerged log
the descending sizes
of painted turtles
weathered oars
we fold our worries
into the river
(note: this collection contains sixteen award-winning haiku)
~~~
3rd Place, 2025 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards
I'm honoured that Random Blue Sparks received 3rd Place in the 2025 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards (for books published in 2024). My thanks to esteemed judges, Patricia J. Machmiller and Scott Mason for their lovely 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
~~~
Shortlisted
The Haiku Foundation 2024 Touchstone Distinguished Book Award
My thanks to the esteemed panel of judges, and to John Barlow of Snapshot Press!
April 3, 2025:
Thrilled to say that Random Blue Sparks is one of 76 books longlisted for the 2024 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award!
April 10, 2025:
Doubly thrilled to say that Random Blue Sparks is one 18 books shortlisted for the 2024 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award!
~~~
R E V I E W S
Random Blue Sparks - Review by Iliyana Stoyanova in Blithe Spirit 35.4, November 2025:
Debbie Strange, a distinguished Canadian poet, artist, photographer, and musician, has carved a unique space within the international haiku and tanka community. A devoted member of numerous literary organizations, including the British Haiku Society, she is widely regarded for both her poems and her haiga, blending visual art with poetic expression. Strange's collection, The Language of Loss: Haiku & Tanka Conversations, has garnered significant recognition, including the 2022 Marianne Bluger Chapbook Award and first prize in the Sable Books 2019 International Women's Haiku Contest, along with an Honourable Mention in the 2021 HSA Merit Book Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple British Haiku Society Awards in both the haiku and tanka sections.
Her most recent book, Random Blue Sparks, awarded the 2020 Snapshot Press Book Award, stands as a testament to her creative vitality. This full-length collection radiates with Strange's signature touch: a blending of lyrical grace and emotional honesty. Her daily creative practice a sustaining force amid chronic illness, has produced thousands of poems and artworks published around the globe. Her kindness and respect for life in all forms permeate very page.
A few haiku from the collection offer a glimpse into her evocative style:
every breath
becomes a cloud . . .
polar night
This haiku marries the intimacy of breath with the vastness of a polar winter crafting a sense of both vulnerability and awe.
firelight knitting another length of silence
Here, Strange delicately weaves image and metaphor, evoking warmth, quiet, and the passage of time in a single gesture.
strung beneath a whale's bleached bones aurora
This monoku juxtaposes mortality and ephemeral beauty, the aurora's fleeting light dancing amid reminders of impermanence.
murmuration
the stories you tell
with your hands
With subtle movement and sound, Strange connects the visually chaotic flight of starlings with the unspoken narrative of human gesture.
Random Blue Sparks is a luminous, deeply felt collection that will reward seasoned readers and newcomers alike with its layers of meaning and striking imagery.
~~~
Random Blue Sparks - Review by Louise Carson in the Haiku Canada Review, Volume 19, Number 2, October 2025:
So many things to look up: peepers' vocal sacs; a split keel; witches' butter (it's a fungus); woolly aphids; parhelion (a bright spot either side of the sun), and ghost apple. As looking up things is one of my hobbies, that's the first thing I liked about Debbie Strange's Random Blue Sparks.
wetland silence
a peeper's vocal sac
expands
See why I had to look it up? Does the sac expand before or during the call? Are we in the moment of silence before it peeps or hearing the silence end and the first welcome call of spring?
Then I noticed the frequent meaningful ordering of the poems, which the poet credits to her editor John Barlow. These two monostichs illustrate this beautifully. First,
wind-spun petals again my thoughts lead nowhere
then one turns the page to read
wild roses everywhere i find my senses
A later sequence of five poems (beginning on page 83) brings us from 'winter solstice' and 'sleight bells,' 'sudden flurries' and 'a blizzard' to
firelight knitting another length of silence
I hope I remember this creative editing when I order the poems in my next manuscript.
Emotion is expressed with subtleness, either visually in
ancient
oak
the
hollow
space
inside
me
or with innuendo,
trilliums
we learn to thrive
in your shadow
But more than anything, I enjoyed joining Strange as she revels in the natural world. The wonder in
bioluminescence
I skip a pebble across
the universe
or the perspective of
prairie hill
a mule deer walks
over the sun
or the layers offered in
goldfinch
one petal remains
on the cosmos
A poet to learn from.
~~~
Random Blue Sparks - Review by paul miller in Modern Haiku. Volume 56.3, Autumn 2025:
Strange's first full-length collection of haiku. She has a sharp eye for the just-right perceptions of her world. Her language is carefully chosen, with the right words chiming in the right place; these are poems meant to be read aloud, and slowly. Primarily poems of nature and the seasons, readers will discover that Strange is as much of the Canadian landscape as her subjects. These are poems of immersion. A fine collection. Recommended. weathered oars / we fold our worries / into the river; firelight knitting another length of silence; parhelion / our lashes thicken / with ice.
~~~
Random Blue Sparks - Review by Rowan Beckett Minor in #FemkuMag, Issue 39, Summer 2025:
Debbie Strange is a Canadian poet who has placed first in many contests including the Harold G. Henderson Award (2015), Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational (2017), and Bloodroot Haiku Award (2022). Her book, The Language of Loss: Haiku & Tanka Conversations, won the Sable Books 2019 International Women's Haiku Contest, received Haiku Canada's 2022 Marianne Bluger Chapbook Award, as well as an Honourable Mention in the Haiku Society of America's 2021 Merit Book Awards. Strange's newest book and first full-length collection of haiku is Random Blue Sparks from Snapshot Press.
Random Blue Sparks is a collection of 85 haiku and senryu on the themes of creation, introspection, and transformation. These poems zoom in on very specific micro moments within various seasons, and expand beyond the average connection and experience with nature. In these moments of clarity, Strange is not simply reflective, but experiences self-actualization as she immerses herself in an active, living world:
evening fog
antlers ghosting through
the coulee
wetland silence
a peeper's vocal sac
expands
The author is entranced by the ordinary, such as a deer in the fog and the breath of a spring peeper. These amplified experiences help readers connect with these split instances in ways they might not expect, or have ever experienced themself.
Strange has an impressive way of intimately connecting with her readers, not just allowing them to see nature through her eyes, but to be present alongside her in the projected moment. This collection is for anyone who identifies with feeling small in a big world, or for those who are lost and looking to be found. Random Blue Sparks is sure to help readers feel less alone and connect with one another, as they navigate "this winter darkness."
~~~
Random Blue Sparks - Review by Tim Dwyer in seashores, Volume 14, April 2025:
This first full collection of haiku and senryu by Debbie Strange is engaging from beginning to end, with no false notes. The experience of nature is specific and vivid and draws in the reader to have their own experience. The following haiku
mossy log
a ruffed grouse drums
up the dawn
illustrates her multi-sensory skill. There are suggestions of texture, scent and movement along with sight and sound that convey the lifefulness of this moment of loneliness, transition, mystery. Throughout the collection, Strange touches upon various aesthetics and is attuned to sound, rhythm, word choice, line endings, juxtaposition and flow. These are clearly poems in haiku form.
Random Blue Sparks includes a number of skillful monoku and vertical haiku. One of these
the ruts we slip into falling leaves
—how smoothly 'we slip into' hinges the beginning and end, conveying the natural scene and suggesting a life or relational issue with a pun of light humour.
Though all the pieces in this collection are rich in nature, her work is interlaced with human concerns, using subtlety, suggestion, ambiguity
circles of lichen
I thought we would have
more time
With the power of light touch, this piece conveys both togetherness and its loss, conveying anything from the end of a hike to the death of a loved one. The poet makes expert use of 'we' a number of times through the collection, suggesting a loving partnership sharing nature, as well as inviting us readers in. She also judiciously uses 'you' and 'I' which are well earned. There are none of what the late, great poet Michael Longley referred to as 'verbal selfies'. Strange never gives too much information.
How skillful Debbie Strange is with human presence in these poems, enhancing the reader's own experience. By the end of Random Blue Sparks, I had travelled through and connected with her Western Canada landscape through seasons, changes in weather, night and day and many feeling tones. This is a work I will come back to often, one from which to learn.
~~~
Random Blue Sparks - Review by Graham Bates for the online blog for the journal Kokako on June 4, 2025 and in the print issue of Kokako 43, September 2025:
Debbie Strange is a Canadian poet who lives on the prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her name is no doubt a familiar one to regular readers of Kokako and various other haiku journals. Random Blue Sparks is her much anticipated first full-length collection of haiku. In 2020 it won the Snapshot Press Book Award and in 2024 was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. It recently received 3rd Place in the Society of America Merit Book Awards. In the acknowledgments there is a long list of journals within which this collection's haiku have previously been published. In the awards credits at the back, 16 haiku are listed as having won prizes, placings or honourable mentions. The design and layout of the book is tastefully done, with one haiku per page, typeset in Palatino.
The book has been called 'a compelling love letter to the prairies, mountains and waters of the western provinces of Canada,' and this is the kind of love that could only be felt by one whose years of hiking with her husband in the country's national parks have given her a deep awareness of their great and delicate beauty so threatened by extreme weather events.
As you would expect from such a seasoned haiku poet, every single word in this collection is earning its living, and there is also a nice variety of techniques at play. It may be necessary to have your phone or tablet handy to search definitions and images, as with the following haiku where, because I rarely encounter snow, I had a fun lesson in how pillow drifts are formed, and was so wonderfully transported by the comparison between its two images, along with its sensory qualities and the subtle wordplay in the last line:
pillow drifts
we pull twin calves
into morning
(10)
I was frequently impressed by Strange's ability to surprise me with her juxtapositions and phrasings. Her aesthetic sense is directly influenced by the Japanese masters, with images homely, rural and wild. All of the haiku consist of between five to ten words, making them easily utterable in one breath. The following seven-word monoku is a good example, where the form complements its subject and the reader is invited to play with where to place the kireji:
the ruts we slip into falling leaves
(73)
Juxtaposition has also been employed in the careful sequencing and layout, where haiku are set beside each other to add emotional depth without overly narrowing down the context:
a split keel
only these waves
of grass
(44)
blistered paint
the boat we named
for you
(45)
Within these pages you will find insights drawn from things as everyday as a dented kettle or a circle of lichen to phenomena as magical as an orca's breath or bioluminescence. This collection is a wonderful example of how nature haiku can speak so well to the joy, grief, love and loss of a life lived fully, while also showing how therapeutic and rewarding the path of haiku can be:
fireflies
so many reasons
to shine
(38)
I feel that Random Blue Sparks' emphasis on the healing power of nature makes it the perfect antidote to the stress, overstimulation and disconnection of our modern world. It is quite simply, as Seamus Heaney put it, 'the music of what happens,' captured and composed by one of Canada's very best.
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