Mary Helen Callier
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Mary Helen Callier’s work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, The Sewanee Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an Olin fellow, and her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, where she was a Dean’s Dissertation Fellow. She lives in Denver and works as an Affiliate Faculty member at Regis University.
Her first book, When the Horses (2025), was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice, and is avaliable for purchase through Alice James Books.
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Reviews:
Lithub, LARB, Full Stop (review), Full Stop (interview), Bear Reviews, Southern Review of Books, NYPL Best New Poetry 2026, New York Times “On Poetry”
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 so
metimes 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
