This book shows that the range of feelings that goes into taking on and then giving up a dog is as deep and wide an emotional swath as any we experience as people, which is to say non-dogs. The insights, confusions, misgivings, wary moments, and entangled joys are all here along with a steady self-scrutiny. We forget, we let go, but we don’t forget the deep tie between dogs and humans and how crucial yet fraught that tie is. Fetch, Muse offers poetry of a very high order to apprehend matters that are basic to our flawed, yearning humanity.
  — Baron Wormser, Maine Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Tom o’ Vietnam

What brims from this elegant collection? A sorrow both compassionate and contemplative, a sorrow wise and deep. Here, Rebecca Starks gives us poems spoken in direct address to her rescued dog named Kismet. “Fetch, Muse,” she says, commanding the dog to “. . . do the work / of memory, dropping life at my feet . . .” And Kismet obeys. In mostly subverted, non-traditional sonnets, Starks’s poems retrieve from memory the story of a rescue that is fated to ultimately fail. Rich with allusion, her work—with its wit and insight and music—salvages for us the story of her relationship with a creature whose very name means fate.
  — Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of Understory

Fetch, Muse is a book of real poems with a real subject, a subject which is difficult to tackle successfully, and Rebecca Starks achieves that success. The poems, mostly unrhymned sonnets, muse on her wayward dog and on her family life. The dog is her true muse. There are many great lines I could quote, but here is the beginning line of a typical sonnet “Fetch, Muse, bring me back what I rejected,” and ends with this memorable final line, “your fetch as long as your leash pulls you up.” Powerful.
  — Greg Delanty, Guggenheim Fellow, author of No More Time