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.
“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
- 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