When the Horses

by Mary Helen Callier

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 "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.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2025

Reviews

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

strange and beautiful poems...very easy to imagine a horse as the speaker whether or not the intention, what a whimsy in every page... personally not a horse girl but if I was I'd be friends w Mary Helen Callier

[aj · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifully strange poems chock full of roundabout similes and images that seem to change shape each time you read through them! I read these as an exploration of the relationships between comfort, desire, and the self: do any of these define or depend on the others? How do we exist as people in the world and in the passage of time depending on how we answer that question? Though I loved many of these poems and themes, I don’t think this collection as a whole was for me. I’d like to come back to it sometime and try again when I’m not mainly reading it in my job’s fluorescent lighting and tile break room

[Susan L. L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In awe and gratitude of Mary Helen Callier's debut book of poems, WHEN THE HORSES—a collection whose speaker pursues the difficult details of her history in the most beautiful and delicate ways, the past so close by yet so ever a mystery. The facts of a life kept alive by the speaker's sheer commitment to understand them, language continually encroaching upon what can't be fully ascertained or said. Such a memorable, haunting collection-dark, tender, important, life-changing.

[Isabelle Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

spare, elegant poems with enough mystery to FULLY satiate!

[anon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, stylish, lush. Exquisite.