When the Horses
When the Horses
Mary Helen Callier
The 2023 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
"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
April 2025
ISBN: 9781949944716
Available in both print and digital formats.
Mary Helen Callier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow and the recipient of 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.
Additional Praise:
"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, "A Constant Reinvention of Language: Looking Ahead to 2025 in Poetry"
"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
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