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]

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

[anneka]

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

[cc]

There was the smell of gasoline, the heavy
sound of gravel. Somewhere in the distance you could hear
an engine choke. Everything was slick and damp
with dew, with the quiet glow a field possesses
moments before being burned.
-- "Tonight I Think My Body Is a Lake"

Each bright light bristles,
each molecule refracts. Pain is like that. Shapes

remain. It doesn't matter in the end
if you've forgotten what they stand for.
-- "Or Call It Winter"

All my life I've looked for
something to destroy me.
-- "Running Your Hand Through the Flame"

I never sank to the bottom of a river. I never stood
on a bridge and wailed. A ship becomes a reef
after years submerged on sand. The parrot
in the corner of the room has just turned eighty.
At this point in his life he prefers a brief "hello."
I don't know to act in the face
of my dismemberment.
-- "The Insatiable Glory of Renaissance Dinners"

I wake
with the sensation

of having kicked precisely
a small thing.
-- "The Decimation of Reefs"

The lake is drained and the mouth
empties itself like a lie, bare and honest,
entirely mine. This is the passive
indifference of beauty. The cut is pulled open

and the bone gleams white as a pearl.
When I was young and mesmerized
I'd worship any pain like that.
-- "The Broken Steps"

[Susan L. L.]

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]

spare, elegant poems with enough mystery to FULLY satiate!

[Davide]

Brilliant, stylish, lush. Exquisite.

[Connor]

"For years I had hoped / to bypass history, live / on its teetering edge"

[Clover]

Well I’m not a fan of poetry in general so I don’t feel like I’m going to judge it fairly