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.

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.

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