I was thrilled yesterday to discover that the Toronto Star had published a review of my poetry collection! There’s something quite intriguing about reading what complete strangers have to say about your work. Here’s what Barbara Carey had to say:
“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 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.”
