Poetry

Deboning a Dragon

a poetry collection
Mansfield Press
ISBN – 978-1771262323
Available November 2019

Deboning a Dragon explores the nature of travel: journeys we take away from places, and towards others. Poems explore the restlessness of teenage years spent waiting for life to begin; the discoveries we make about ourselves when we plunge from known worlds into stranger ones, and the ultimate journey to parenthood. “Deboning a Dragon attests to the probability that shared experience can provide a bridge to span otherness. Hartley is a passionate observer, leaving her own signposts along the way.” – Denis De Klerk

Deboning a Dragon is available on Amazon, in bookstores, or Mansfield Press.

REVIEW – Barbara Carey, for the Toronto Star and Toronto.com, 10 January 2020:

“Deboning a dragon is not like deboning a fish,” Julie Hartley writes in her debut collection. It’s a reminder that imaginary beasts inhabit a different realm than earthly creatures; yet the real and the fantastical often intersect appealingly in her work. The Toronto poet grew up in Britain, and many poems reference real places and are grounded in details that seem authentic, as in “Home Address,” a narrative looking back at childhood, where the speaker describes “the fat-crackle of Mabel’s fish ’n’ chips” and eating “Marmite thick-spread on baps.” But the poems also frequently spiral into the surreal. Hartley’s best poems spark with evocative imagery and carry an emotional charge, whether describing travels, the joy and trepidation of motherhood, or a mysterious nighttime journey from a young child’s perspective, and there’s her observations are often disarmingly whimsical: “I’d like to be/on the backside of an/escalator just to see what/those marching stairs/become in a whispered/upside-down dark.”