The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects.

—Michael Collier

“Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,” Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa’s poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.

—Mark Doty

“The world tilts in strange guises. Behold these, love these,” Helena Mesa writes at the end of a long journey. I am moved by her notes to saints, by the way she limits the distance between strangers, by her quest for a sacred grove. There is a deep aura of solitude in this splendid first book.’”

—Edward Hirsch