When the Horses($16.72Value)

Description

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 wrote: "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. "Forsaking surfaces for centers and margins for cores, with all the nuanced reversals and surprising reflections one feels within, Mary Helen Callier undertakes the inward journey in her debut collection, When The Horses . Digging deep, she puts “what I found buried / in the dirt” into the light and faces what she finds. ... a stunning collection about self-knowledge." —Dale Cottingham, Rain Taxi Review of Books "Callier’s movement through ['The Battle of San Romano'] has a quality of leaping, giving chase, like our movement through her eyes around the painting. The insistence on a background detail as central makes the poem feel asymmetrical—teetering, unstable, an egg on a marble table. But she also seems to be saying: this is my Uccello, making no strong claim, as Auden might, to what the painting is 'about' for anyone else." —Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times "Rather than treating memory as a static or perfect record or archive, Callier uses theater to investigate the fluidity and ever-changing nature of our memories. When the Horses is a poetry collection that feels like parting the curtains of your own imperfect, fleeting life. ... Though some liken her work to walking through a haunted house, I find it carries a deeper, hypnotic quality—almost akin to sleepwalking in a feral state before waking." —Maria Giesbrecht, Electric Literature "Precise, pristine, slightly cold poems but in the way that Plath can feel cold, like hot ice! ... Intriguing" —Elisa Gabbert "Mary Helen Callier’s debut poetry collection,  When the Horses , is a masterful foray into a girlhood and self shaped by the unruly landscape of the American South. ... Altogether, the collection reads as a tour of a haunted home, each room enclosed with a secret and a memory." —Brandi Martin,  October Hill Magazine "... Gorgeous, intelligent, enigmatic, humanly nuanced poems." —Loisa Fenichell "When the Horses  is Mary Helen Callier’s award-winning debut, a collection that explores the imaginative landscapes of childhood through poems rooted in the uncanny beauty of the American South. Callier delves into memory not as a fixed record but as a theater, echoing Walter Benjamin’s idea that memory is a stage where fragments of the past flicker in and out of focus." — Platform "[Callier's] is a poetry of mystical attention, trained so evenly on beauty and pain that the two begin to spill into each other." —Benjamin Paul,  Los Angeles Review of Books "Callier’s meddling with interiority and exteriority maps, unmaps and remaps form and time, showing us our inescapable vulnerability. ... Through attention, we open to the myriad realms consciousness offers, bringing us closer to ourselves and what connects us. Callier’s quiet, stunning mastery teems with hunger, and promise." —Lindsay Rockwell,  Bear Review "In  When The Horses , Mary Helen Callier has written a collection that lingers — one that refuses to look away from either the surfaces that are inscrutable and crude, or the depths that are nameless. Hers is a voice that does not just describe but transforms, reminding us why poetry matters. Poetry names what we struggle to hold, and in that naming, makes it bearable." —Sristi Ray, Southern Review of Books "[Callier's] faith in the persistence of what’s unknown and her ability to plumb that mysterious realm delivers a series of intimate revelations throughout this book." —Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club "I fell for this debut collection two poems in. Callier’s crisp marriage of sentence and line sings across the psychic landscapes of childhood and into elements of desire made slant." — Literary Hub "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, author of Emporium and Material Witness "Mary Helen