We are so excited to be welcoming back former Subterranean Mary Helen Callier for her St. Louis launch of When the Horses. She will be joined by Stefania Gomez.
https://store.subbooks.com/event/author-event-mary-helen-callier-and-stefania-gomez
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.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“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, author of Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War
MARY HELEN CALLIER is currently an instructor and doctoral student in the English and Literary Arts department at the University of Denver, where she serves as one of the poetry editors for the Denver Quarterly. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, When the Horses, was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice.
STEFANIA GOMEZ earned an MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She has received fellowships from the Dirt Palace, Sewanee Writers Workshop, Lambda Literary, and the International Quilt Museum, and she was a finalist for a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She was a 2023–2024 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship semifinalist and a 2023 Fulbright Research Award fellow to Spain. Her work was a semifinalist for the 2023 Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the 2022 OSU The Journal Wheeler Prize, the 2023 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the 2023 Four Way Books Levis Prize, the 2024 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, and the 2023 National Poetry Series.
https://store.subbooks.com/event/author-event-mary-helen-callier-and-stefania-gomez
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