Teresa Cader’s AT RISK journeys through dangerous territory. Sometimes, as in the title poem, it’s a dog park where a rescue dog, “beaten silly for missing pheasants,” cowers; outside a local diner, a mother lies “slumped over the steering wheel” after discovering her son has OD’d. Or it’s the bombing of “the city whose name sticks on my tongue / the way / Buczkowice once did, my father’s Polish village…." The book follows a family split by war and displacement, a father whose silence inflicts its own pain, and flash bulletins from an increasingly damaged world. But Cader’s poems embrace moments of rapture as well: cousins discover each other, children are born, an unquiet mind finds peace while fish replenish a river. Cader accomplishes all this with a masterful sense of form—her ghazals, sonnets, and couplets complement inventive free verse, their music always fresh.
Cader’s poems match life’s daily details to the surreal aftermath of suffering. News of a “live shooter in an elementary school” morphs kitchen chairs into circus elephants, the speaker in “Thoughts and Prayers” retreating under a tent, “half-smothering the children inside me.” A peacock, avatar of Homer, struts on her deck, “its hundred eyes… in the kitchen / as I knead my floured mound of dough.” When its feathers catch “glints of sun from the window, / …Homer’s soul opens like a peony in the garden.” “Pythagoras Said the Soul of Homer Moved into a Peacock” continues:
I’ve learned my grandmother kept a pet peacock
as a security system. It shrieked when the Nazis
stormed her road, but she and my young aunt and uncle
fled weeks earlier on the last ship for New York.
Cader links the everyday act of making bread to the soul of a poet resplendent as a peacock’s tail or a peony, then to the storms of invasion and flight—all within the span of a few dozen lines.
The poet’s curiosity spans subjects as various as the grotesque results of the Fukushima disaster—radioactive wild boars—to a tenth-century surgeon who refuses to drill the skull of a boy haunted by his rape. Instead, Cader imagines, al-Zahwari assures the boy he believes him, bending “to whisper, Absolutely.” In these and other poems, Cader explores the ways love, terror, and wisdom are bound to the body. In her witty homage to Dolly Parton, “Ode to Teased Hair,” bouffant birds courting at her window spark a “memory of myself with a teased mop in high school”; the blue-collar boys “wore leather,” while middle-class kids—with Breck-girl hair, we assume—“went to college and France.” Cader quotes words from the singer’s lips, “a gobsmacking vermillion,” to show how easy it is to humiliate and other a class by mocking their bodies, clothes, and accents. “Happy Hour with Chaucer” recalls “sounding out your hammered pentameter,” in a neck brace, his Canterbury pilgrims “distraction // from my doctor’s prognosis that I might never really / walk again. / I could read, so I could travel beyond my body.” Confined by the pandemic as it was isolated in college, Cader’s body finds liberation through art.
At the center of AT RISK is “Poland: A Fugue,” both family history and reminder of how “the war to end all wars” spawned horrors for those who emigrated to escape and those left behind to endure the Nazis and Soviets. In “Shortwave Radio: September 1, 1939,” Cader’s father’s silence about his Polish family—cousins, a brother, and an aunt never acknowledged—might have begun with survivor’s guilt over news of Hitler’s invasion delivered to a group of émigré fishing buddies: “… how long did the broadcast last, / telling them what they knew without being told—Your family will eat dust behind tanks, / your village will be fire without water, and you who got out can do nothing.”
One of AT RISK’s most brilliant and harrowing poems is a dramatic monologue in the voice of twentieth-century German villagers browsing a selection of children seized from Poland. “Forced Labor” begins:
Thrust into the platz, wobbly-legged, bleating whatever it is boys bleat
when they’re on the bench, sized up and sized down, how strong,
how much will he eat, can he learn German, what about his momma,
will a beating or two knock her out of him, does he have lice
Notice the staccato lines, how “wobbly-legged” wobbles against “boys bleat / when they’re on the bench,” how the hard consonants continue with “up,” “down,” and “strong” as Cader crafts her litany of monstrous appraisal. The villagers worry about the future—will the boys grow “interested in sexual things” forbidden to them, “with their blood subhuman and their brains primitive….” These fears echo in the language of today’s politics. The poem’s final lines return to the clipped, one- and two-syllable language of the first, the villagers satisfied that after their use, “only the dregs” will be left, “his life wrung from him like whiskey from a flattened leather flask.” The shriveling of life into leather, its full skin flattened, enacts a clinical taxidermy in which human bodies become throwaway trash: authoritarian philosophy in a nutshell.
AT RISK also reckons with the risks of love. It’s the repeating end-word in “Ghazal of the Goats”—“Not the lyric song of shepherds, my love / bleats ungodly tunes in private”—that introduces the union between “Goat Man Ches McCartney” and “a Spanish knife-thrower, his near-miss lethal lover” to that lover's wry consideration of a long marriage: “In my act, you don’t flinch, duck, scrape, or bow. / It appears you’re an idiot for love.” Cader feels the awe of first-time motherhood in “Paean”: “Out of our bodies we made a world, named / after ourselves, not knowing / whether it harbored a rage we might never understand, / or a god come to save us.” But awe doesn’t erase the wit of those first eleven words. “Paean” ends with images of renewal, as the couple build a haven from the world’s alarms:
Let me lead you now across that field
of buttercups, loosestrife's riot of purple,
across a doorsill that opens into our sanctuary,
to windows scraped clean from winter.
AT RISK’s finale is a discursive, fluid exemplar of juxtaposition, an art Cader deploys throughout her verse. Efforts to restore fish to a local lake in “Urban River Run” unite pilgrims, Thoreau, volunteers hauling buckets before the advent of fish ladders, and Cader’s family memories. She becomes census taker, watching an underwater video camera as eels “sleek-tail-it upstream nearby, / next to roads jammed with traffic.” When musing over fish, her staggered, flexible stanzas lap the page from margin to margin as they mimic the run of thought:
Immigrants from the Pilgrims onward
lived on river herring, shad, salmon.
Silver running they’d called
the spring herring migrations so abundant
they colored the rivers
Thought consolidates in the poem’s final stanza, a summary of strategies to survive the threats of nature, nurture, and history:
When I worry about my daughters far from home,
I can count fish at my river.
When I worry about my foot swelling in the heat,
I can count fish in my living room.
When the stink of traffic and gas leaks on Massachusetts Avenue
makes me long for the ocean,
I can go to the Mystic Lakes and watch a blue heron on shore.
I can uproot Oriental bittersweet.
I can prepare for the run back to the sea.
AT RISK was selected by Mark Doty as winner of Ashland Poetry Press’ 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize (available at AshlandPoetryPress.com/product/at-risk). Its vision aligns the past with the present, art with survival, and family with memory in poems that wring the heart with pathos and shift the mind with epiphanies. Teresa Cader’s AT RISK offers a dazzling, breathtaking response to the perplexities of our times.
