When the Horses - by Mary Helen Callier (Paperback)

About the Book

"When the Horses recalls a girlhood spent in the American South; between the domestic and natural worlds, where the symmetry and control of human touch have begun to fall away-these are poems of encounter: with place, self, other, and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss. In Callier's poems, the southern landscape represents what is excess in the self. As Walter Benjamin wrote: "Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater," and it is in the bedraggled theater of memory that Callier stages her poems. A careful, curtained-off darkness lurks at their edges, and we, her audience, can only see what steps out from it. Some poems register their actors in shadow, in silhouette, evoking, often, the shape of a thing, the sound it makes, instead of the thing itself. To read them is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking--a dream that haunted a wounded part of you, though you can't remember which"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Precise, pristine, slightly cold poems but in the way that Plath can feel cold, like hot ice! ... Intriguing"
--Elisa Gabbert

"Mary Helen Callier's debut poetry collection, When the Horses, is a masterful foray into a girlhood and self shaped by the unruly landscape of the American South. ... Altogether, the collection reads as a tour of a haunted home, each room enclosed with a secret and a memory."
--Brandi Martin, October Hill Magazine

"... Gorgeous, intelligent, enigmatic, humanly nuanced poems."
--Loisa Fenichell

"When the Horses is Mary Helen Callier's award-winning debut, a collection that explores the imaginative landscapes of childhood through poems rooted in the uncanny beauty of the American South. Callier delves into memory not as a fixed record but as a theater, echoing Walter Benjamin's idea that memory is a stage where fragments of the past flicker in and out of focus."
--Platform

"[Callier's] is a poetry of mystical attention, trained so evenly on beauty and pain that the two begin to spill into each other."
--Benjamin Paul, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Callier's meddling with interiority and exteriority maps, unmaps and remaps form and time, showing us our inescapable vulnerability. ... Through attention, we open to the myriad realms consciousness offers, bringing us closer to ourselves and what connects us. Callier's quiet, stunning mastery teems with hunger, and promise."
--Lindsay Rockwell, Bear Review

"In When The Horses, Mary Helen Callier has written a collection that lingers -- one that refuses to look away from either the surfaces that are inscrutable and crude, or the depths that are nameless. Hers is a voice that does not just describe but transforms, reminding us why poetry matters. Poetry names what we struggle to hold, and in that naming, makes it bearable."
--Sristi Ray, Southern Review of Books

"[Callier's] faith in the persistence of what's unknown and her ability to plumb that mysterious realm delivers a series of intimate revelations throughout this book."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club

"I fell for this debut collection two poems in. Callier's crisp marriage of sentence and line sings across the psychic landscapes of childhood and into elements of desire made slant."
--Literary Hub

"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, author of Emporium and Material Witness

"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 of Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020

About the Author

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.