Mary Helen Callier and I first met when she was earning her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, and again when we became coworkers at Subterranean Books, the independent bookstore down the road from the school.
Working alongside someone at a bookstore is an interesting way to get to know them, especially a fellow writer. As Mary Helen’s poems accumulated acceptances during those months we shared the floor behind the cash register, I started to read her work, and admire it–with its stark, clean, destabilizing lines, its images that twist around themselves, the way its cool assuredness is punctuated by moments of heat and light. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that even the books she recommended to our customers–Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, the novels of Annie Ernaux–and the music she’d put on over the stereo–Tucker Zimmerman and Black Marble’s “A Great Design”–were further expressions of her artistic sensibility, of the feeling that her poetry evokes. Which is to say: great exactitude, great restraint, a kind of dark blue hum that gives way suddenly to flashes of desire, and violence.
This is precisely the effect produced by When the Horses, Mary Helen’s new collection published by Alice James Books. Throughout the poems gathered here, the speaker’s experience is reflected, refracted by confrontation with the external world, in the forms of animals, Renaissance paintings, strange new places; the pieces summon the sense memory of the eerie, inchoate sexuality of childhood, the gulf of communication between lovers, the electricity of the air before a storm. By the end of When the Horses, the reader has moved through objects familiar and unfamiliar and emerged transformed. The last poem of the book is titled “And Then When What You Knew of It Was Over”–a perfect, fitting finale to this collection that invites us to reexamine so many simple things we thought we understood.
In the spring of 2025 we connected over email to discuss this book. I’m thrilled that When the Horses is out in the world, and look forward to finding it on the shelves of independent bookstores for years to come.
Griffin Reed: Can you tell me about the origins of this collection? How did you start writing it, what was the process like?
Mary Helen Callier: I wrote most of these poems during my MFA. I was living in St. Louis, it was during lockdown, I was teaching poetry classes and spending most of my time in my house, or walking to the park nearby. When I came to the MFA, I was writing longer poems. Over time they got a bit shorter, which might’ve been a product of “the workshop poem,” as people call it, but I think I also discovered something I felt aesthetically drawn to in the form of the short lyric poem: its capacity for narrative distillation, its movements, its transformations—an uncanny potential that seemed to fit the strangeness of that time. The capacity for contained movement captured me, and I began to see it as a generative constraint. I wrote poem to poem, and eventually I found an order for them. Carl Phillips’ prosody class was essential for me. I think I went to him at one point in a panic saying that I didn’t know what I was writing, and he told me to just keep going, and whatever it was would emerge.
Animals obviously play a huge role in this book. There’s an animal in almost every poem, from horses to hares to lots of dogs. That seems intentional—what drew you to this insistence on the creaturely?
I grew up with animals, I had horses when I was young and there were almost always as many dogs in my house as people. I think the presence of animals in the poems might just be a product of that. But, also, I think it points to an awareness of other consciousnesses, ones that can’t be known in the same way, but can be known regardless. If anything, the animals in the poems might signal an attention to or an awareness of these other types of knowing: one’s that come through presence rather than speech. My dog (Max) and I understand each other. He reminds me what I do and don’t have access to. He helps me pay attention. I think many writers like animals for just that reason. I once read that Hilda Hilst had over a hundred dogs, which is surely an exaggeration, but it’s one of those great mythic details.
In addition to the natural world, something that recurs in When the Horses is your use of ekphrasis—in particular, the representation of artworks like “The Battle of San Romano,” “Flaying of Marsyas,” Frida Kahlo’s “The Flying Bed.” Where did those influences come from? Do you see these subjects as interrelated, nature and art?
I think the artworks are things to think with, things the mind can animate for its own ends. I wrote “The Flying Bed” because I wanted to write a sestina—which I’d never done, and likely won’t do again. I noticed the painting had 6 objects in it, so I decided for the sestina each object would be an end-word in each of the 6 stanzas. I like being in connection with things made across time: and for both of these poems in particular, I was finding and creating narratives within what these paintings depicted.
Another thing I really loved about this book is the way that many of the poems evoke a sense of instability, disorientation, refraction. The first poem of the collection, in particular, “To Have Caused the Quake, to Have Torn it Open,” really set the tone for me with its unsettling manipulations of time and space, like in the concluding lines: “I can’t say for sure / just what it was: a skull, a hole, a rounded pearl, a tiny orb / inside of which small winds had once been turning. / But every night I could feel it / moving farther from the earth.” Was this use of tension or irresolution something you were thinking about while writing these pieces? Is it something you look for as a reader of poetry, too?
Yes! Absolutely. That feeling of disorientation might be my favorite thing about poetry. I think poems can bring about new possibilities by skirting the edges of sense, or they can expand our capacity for sense-making. I think this is often a product of the tension between form and meaning, or a product of the interplay between thinking and sound. With that poem in particular, I wanted it to feel outside of time or even being: where the found object remains unidentified, like a ruin or a remnant from the future or past, like Kafka’s Odradek, but not as funny. I think this desire for irresolution, more broadly, is a desire to stay with the phenomenal world. When I was writing the poem, of course, I doubt I was “thinking” about any of that. I was just writing about an object I found in the woods.
Another reason I think that opening poem works so well is that it’s set alone, comprising the entirety of the first of seven sections. How did the sequencing of this project come together?
All I can say is it took a lot of reordering. At one point, I grouped the poems into 5 poems each, and I had them all in little piles, and I tried to find movements between them: narrative or emotional, imagistic or otherwise. I knew I wanted the first and last poems to echo each other. After that it was all very practical: I need to move this poem because it has the same word as the next poem, etc.
These poems move through many different places—“Missouri,” “Yellow Springs,” “Hamilton, Georgia.” The Georgia of the speaker’s memory, especially, seems to ground the collection. Can you tell me a bit about the significance of place for you in this book?
I like how quickly proper nouns, places especially, can signify. When I say “Missouri,” something is evoked. But it isn’t prescriptive. There’s a definite ambiguity in that, which I like. I think places operate in the poem to lend a sense of the ordinary. Of course, they’re also all places I have lived or have been to.
There’s just one poem in When the Horses that doesn’t have all of its lines left-aligned, and that’s “Deep Blue Thing (with the Middle Punched Through),” in which the second and fourth of five lines are indented. Why that poem? How do you approach form in your work, more generally?
I think form is generative. I like participating in the history of form: I like the psychological and rhetorical thrust of a sonnet; I like the order of quatrains and the notion that when I’m writing a quatrain I’m in a lineage of that. I like what form makes possible, but mostly I care about the words themselves, where they are, and what they’re doing, which is of course form, too. Indentation specifically, I think, creates a certain movement, a pause, a shift in register, a rhythmic feeling that I do think transfers to the reading and cognitive registering of the poem itself. The eye moves, the sense moves: the words are what matter, but the form can generate, undercut, or emphasize them. That poem itself was so short, I felt the movement added something essential.
In a note you provided to accompany an excerpt of this book over at the Hopkins Review, you observe that while writing When the Horses “Certain things that had preoccupied me—youth, childhood, desire—became object-like; I could move through them, or set them down.” What things are preoccupying you now?
That’s a great question. By no means did I mean to imply I had moved beyond those things, but I do think this book helped me achieve some needed respite. As far as what’s preoccupying me now: I’m almost done with my PhD, and working on my second book. I’ve been reading about voice and I’m taking a class on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and medieval monasticism with Dr. Donna Beth Ellard. I’m interested in how so many people talk about “voice” in poetry, and yet no one can really say what it is. Is it style? Is it personality? What about poems without “speakers”? I just found this book Lives of the Voice: An Essay on Closeness by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, published this month with Stanford, so I’m excited to look into that. Other than that it’s all my day to day life: teaching, working, trying to write, trying to find ways to show up in the world that matter. It’s such a difficult time, and while talking about poems isn’t everything, I do think it’s something essential. I like to think my students really enjoy or find solace in being able to get together in a room and talk about poems twice a week and write them—I know it really helps me.
Griffin Reed is a writer originally from St. Louis and currently living in Chicago. She’s the Managing Editor of Boulevard.
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