Juneau Public Library Book Blog

Bring Me Her Heart: poems by Sarah Getty  inhabits a world where “roots and rocks emerge from the forest path like half-spoken thoughts”. Rooted in mythology and soil, and the reclaiming of old legends, Getty’s narrative poems unfold before the reader as if written on scrolls. A sampling of the language from “The Unveiling of Truth”, where an embodied Truth sits, “like she might flap / and fly, albino vampiress, half-blind in this dim room’s light.” In “Gepetto in the Belly of the Dogfish”, Pinocchio’s maker mourns the loss of his finest creation, recalling “how knife-strokes freed (his) face/ and figure from the wood”. In the dark, shadowy story worlds of this collection the reader is left wondering, “If wood / can walk and talk—well, then why shouldn’t / the things I dream about come true?”  Fans of fractured fairy tales will love “Conversation of Frogs” and “Bring Me Her Heart” and Getty’s cleverly absurt twisting of these old stories.

reviewed by: Jonas