Overview

In her award-winning debut, When the Horses, Mary Helen Callier explores the rich inner terrain of an imaginative childhood through deep and curious poems set against the uncanny beauty of the American South. As Walter Benjamin wrote: ""Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater,"" and it is in this bedraggled theater of memory that Callier stages her poems. A careful, curtained-off darkness lurks at their edges, actors appearing more in silhouette, evoking, often, the shape of a thing, the sound it makes, instead of the thing itself. Like all memories, these moments are fleeting. To read When the Horses is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking--a dream that haunts a wounded part of you, though you can't remember which. These are poems of encounter--with place, self, other--and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss.

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9781949944716

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Reviews

""Here's a poet rubbing her eyes against the surfaces of the world like it shouldn't hurt and sometimes it doesn't--like when the surface is a watery 'tell-all source'--and other times, oh, it hurts, it hurts to make you think. Mary Helen Callier's got a flinty, ekphrastic way of looking at all things (painted or not). Her poems are full of wit and desire, deep and dark."" --Aditi Machado ""Mary Helen Callier's When the Horses--a masterclass in economy, precision, and sheer beauty--lays bare the reckless wilderness of the self, where history and memory become impossible to distinguish; instead, we're left with ruin's bright details, its stubborn questions: What if the voice in your head is the voice of a stranger, marooned there? What does it mean to live more privy to the world than part of it, and yet to love the world, fiercely, all the same?"" --Carl Phillips

"""Mary Helen Callier's When the Horses--a masterclass in economy, precision, and sheer beauty--lays bare the reckless wilderness of the self, where history and memory become impossible to distinguish; instead, we're left with ruin's bright details, its stubborn questions: What if the voice in your head is the voice of a stranger, marooned there? What does it mean to live more privy to the world than part of it, and yet to love the world, fiercely, all the same?"" --Carl Phillips"

Author Information

MARY HELEN CALLIER's poems have been widely published in outlets such as Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, and The Arkansas International. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow and was awarded a Howard Nemerov Prize. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and is currently a doctoral student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver in Denver, CO where she lives. Her debut collection, When the Horses, won the 2023 Alice James Award - Editor's Choice and is forthcoming in April 2025.

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