Mary Helen Callier: When the Horses

Description

Alice James Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 15, 2025

Publisher Marketing: “When the Horses recalls a girlhood spent in the American South; between the domestic and natural worlds, where the symmetry and control of human touch have begun to fall away-these are poems of encounter: with place, self, other, and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss. In Callier’s poems, the southern landscape represents what is excess in the self.

As Walter Benjamin wrote: “Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater,” and it is in the bedraggled theater of memory that Callier stages her poems. A careful, curtained-off darkness lurks at their edges, and we, her audience, can only see what steps out from it. Some poems register their actors in shadow, in silhouette, evoking, often, the shape of a thing, the sound it makes, instead of the thing itself. To read them is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking–a dream that haunted a wounded part of you, though you can’t remember which”–

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