Contact Writing
Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, When the Horses, was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice. She received her MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for Denver Quarterly.
READINGS & EVENTS
NYC Poetry Festival, reading with Alice James Books, July 13, 2025, The Brinkley @ 1pm
Subterranean Books, reading with Stefania Gomez, St. Louis, MO, June 12, 2025, @ 7pm
Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, May 31, 2025
Words like Blades, reading with Diane Seuss and Daniel Ruiz, April 28, zoom
The Reading Den, Denver, CO, April 30, 2025, @ 7pm
Counterpath, When the Horses, book launch with Daniel Ruiz and Jane Huffman, April 18, 2025 @ 6pm
AWP Los Angeles, off-site reading with Alice James Books, March 28, 2025
READINGS & EVENTS
NYC Poetry Festival, reading with Alice James Books, July 13, 2025, The Brinkley @ 1pm
Subterranean Books, reading with Stefania Gomez, St. Louis, MO, June 12, 2025, @ 7pm
Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, May 31, 2025
Words like Blades, reading with Diane Seuss and Daniel Ruiz, April 28, zoom
The Reading Den, Denver, CO, April 30, 2025, @ 7pm
Counterpath, When the Horses, book launch with Daniel Ruiz and Jane Huffman, April 18, 2025 @ 6pm
AWP Los Angeles, off-site reading with Alice James Books, March 28, 2025
Praise for When the Horses
“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
“Like many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, those in When the Horses speak of the damage that lies beneath the resilient outermost layer of being human. In the poem “At Night I Sing,” a spider wears (metaphoric) heels. Those heels punch holes in the calm exterior. Then there are the meditations on time, how it cruelly never stands still but only becomes evidence, the clean bone visible through the breaking. These poems are beautiful, strange, and altogether startling.”
- Mary Jo Bang
"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
“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
“Like many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, those in When the Horses speak of the damage that lies beneath the resilient outermost layer of being human. In the poem “At Night I Sing,” a spider wears (metaphoric) heels. Those heels punch holes in the calm exterior. Then there are the meditations on time, how it cruelly never stands still but only becomes evidence, the clean bone visible through the breaking. These poems are beautiful, strange, and altogether startling.”
- Mary Jo Bang
"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