Long time since I tried answering a PM question, so apologies for the likely off-baseness of it. But I was drawn to it because I sense I'll be needing to do the same thing.

Have you tried dereferencing the returned value?

I've always been terrible at this, but the snippet from http://perlmeme.org/howtos/using_perl/dereferencing.html helped me in the past:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $array_ref = ['apple', 'banana', 'orange'];
    my @array = @$array_ref;

    print "Reference: $array_ref\n";
    print "Dereferenced: @array\n";
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