AT RISK

by Teresa Cader

(Ashland Poetry Press, 2024) 

Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff

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. 

No Sweet Without Brine

by Cynthia Manick

(Amistad, 2023) 

Reviewed by Kashawn Taylor

The unapologetic Blackness of Cynthia Manick’s poetry in No Sweet Without Brine is what makes the writing shine as though the poems are lathered with cocoa butter.  The collection ensures the reader knows that we are “living, not just alive.”  It is a fruit, both sweet and sour, familiarly and painfully refreshing.  

In “I Try to Imagine Them Smitten,” Manick writes about Black love, and her parents’ specifically. The language here is mostly simple, without pomp and flourish, but it is a testament to Manick’s skill with words that she does not have to use esoteric diction to create something beautiful, moving. The poem opens, “I’ve never seen my parents’ kiss” and goes on to describe a photograph in which her parents appear and tries to imagine them “smitten / past the slammed doors / past the obsidian quiet” musing that perhaps it only happened once, presumably to create her. This poem speaks volumes on Black love, how quiet and stoic it appears to the outsider. How even a daughter finds it difficult to imagine her parents smitten.  

Manick plays with form and white space in poems such as “Tanka Suite on Survival” and “Litany for My Fears and Questions.” In the former, she references cultural events like Hurricane Katrina—a notoriously devastating natural disaster for the Black community—and, in the latter, asks, “Is it wrong to want a storm named after you?” The juxtaposition of these two poems demonstrates the conflict within Black women: to mourn the dead exhaustedly from a storm / to want be the storm.  

Keeping the storm imagery in “Dear Superman,” she writes that Superman flies past “women of strong flavors” and “hot peppers between their legs / and a storm inside.” Manick asserts Superman flies past these women of color in favor of the Lois Lane-type because they “secretly stir [him] from liver to toenail.” The poem, however, ends with a sort of pleading, telling Superman that those ignored women too desire “strong arms” and “have dreams of sleeping between stars.”

The book speaks to me in subtle ways. Manick’s use of the Eintou inspired me. The form, which takes its name from West African for “pearl” contains thirty-two syllables and is meant to give the reader insight on something, a new piece of information.—pearls of wisdom, if you will. In Manick’s “Eintou for Possibility," she writes that the “gap between / my teeth is actually / a portal.”  The gap in front teeth is common among Black people; I have one myself. In this poem Manick turns a common imperfection into something magical, “a world where all the / gaps meet.”

Manick’s switches voices effortlessly throughout, using what is commonly called a “blaccent” in poems like “Livin’ Flush” to using proper grammar in the next piece, “Girls Like Me Are Made Of….” The narrators in these poems showcase and celebrate all different types of Black, whether you speak pretty or not. 

No Sweet Without Brine lives up to its title. While there is sweetness in this ode to Blackness, there is also a sourness that comes with it. From enjoying listening to Idris Elba on a sleep app to a poem about self-care titled “Notes Toward a Poem on Self-Care,” Manick encapsulates the many joys and fears of growing up a black woman. The fruit imagery shines throughout, a reference to the sweet and sour aspects of simply Existing While Black, and the reader comes away feeling better for having experienced a soulful, candid ride. 

Kashawn Taylor is a Black, queer, formerly incarcerated writer based in Connecticut. He holds a BA in English and Psychology and an MA in English and creative writing, and is currently an MFA student. His work has appeared recently in such journals as, The Shore Poetry, Querencia Press, Oyster River Pages, Prison Journalism Project, and more. He has work forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Emergent Literary, Union Spring Literary Review, Tufts University's reSentencing Journal, among others. His collection of "prison poetry," subhuman, is forthcoming in March 2025 from Wayfarer Books. Find him on Instagram, @kashawn.writes, or www.kashawntaylor.com.

Sky. Pond. Mouth.

by Kevin McLellan

(YAS Press, 2024) 

Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff

Sky. Pond. Mouth. is Kevin McLellan’s fifth collection of poems, and winner of the first Granite State Poetry Prize. That McLellan is also a videographer, photographer, and creator of art/book objects is reflected in the shapeliness and precision of his writing. Whether entering the ecosystem of nature, literature, or bodies in motion, McLellan’s work defines implacable boundaries and the desire to permeate them—beginning with the book’s title. Three one-syllable words suggest a confluence of air, water, and hunger, but the end-stops silo their contact. Sky. Pond. Mouth. balances the lure of detachment with the urge to connect; typographically and lyrically, the book embraces negative space in its urge to discover some positive energy in a series of fractured natural, social, and emotional spheres.

McLellan’s language enacts the ambiguity of the world, beginning with various landscapes in the book’s first section. In “Always Something Falling,” “The lake // is a mirror, then it isn’t.” Moisture on a tent floor “might be condensation from / my own breath that beaded / above my head & the-once- / a-part-of me rained.” Notice how “a-part” is also “apart,” and how “rain” erases the separation between indoors and out, body and nature. McLellan interrogates many sorts of boundaries; in poems like “Bloodroot,” the speaker is a plant, and its diction downright bloody: “’cause rooted in taint;” “’cause red;” “suicidal petals ‘cause.” In “Interrupted Fern,” the plant’s bipinnate fronds each have a separate vein, as the visual separation of dashes and stanza breaks spar with the sense of wholeness in a one-sentence poem: 

    gap—blade—gap

    —my portions died

    back—the blade—

    back into the gap— 

Of the longer poems that punctuate the distilled lyrics of Sky. Pond. Mouth., the first section-length piece, a prose poem, quotes A.R. Ammons: “is freedom identity without / identity?” Part meditation, part reminiscence, and part self-interrogation, “The Corridor” constructs, section by section, a passage for a speaker who “break(s) each morning as if emerging from the sea—this underworld of disorientation and gasp, and these pressing thoughts about entering a room.” Fellow-passengers include a man on a bus whose “handsomeness” the speaker detects “needed care, and I imagined him with me,” and memories of telling his mother “I need mornings to be quiet. But this morning, for the first time, she said nothing, and it felt like death.” Is identity a consequence of need, and is it possible to be free of it? In the final section of “Corridors” McLellan concludes, “Out of the closet. There are reasons to hide.” What follows is a counter-quote from Angels in America author Tony Kushner: "To exist in public demands performance."

How does a gay man perform in everyday life, knowing the risks of self-revelation? In “Regarding What Was Lost Before I Knew It Was Taken,” McLellan spies a man locking his bike: “Is it the manager of the natural foods market? ... He didn’t acknowledge me. As if the look we shared never happened.” Inside a café, behind a window, on Facebook, or camping, McLellan wonders, “Is it the man?” The poem ends with McLellan crossing boundaries “in front of a glass window, … this time on the outside,” after: 

    the moment I

    now longer

    needed

    to fear

    the given

    you-are-positive

    news

    taken

    within.

The shadow that AIDs casts on the poem’s conclusion revises the light in which it’s been read.

This retrospective charge reoccurs in the book’s final section-length poem, “Winterberries.” Completed in the aftermath of surgery that removed a second testicular cancer, the poem begins, “My thoughts have no place / to go, except more inward—.” Yet the speaker can’t help observing what’s around him: a frozen river; winterberries that “from afar look like specks of blood / on the snow, like perforations;” and a place where “wind made the light and an ash / tree seem one.” Though “in other words, I’m a eunuch,” the speaker can’t help looking—present and past framed by a visceral experience that has altered what a statue, a cello, a poem, or a stand of winterberries can signify. “Winterberries,” with the afterword that follows, recasts the reader’s understanding of the preceding poems, especially the Ammons quote and its relationship to sex. The reverberations are like a chainsaw’s cutting through bone.   

The attention that McLellan’s publisher, Yas Press, has given to the design and production of Sky. Pond. Mouth. is worth noting. Every poem begins on the right-facing (recto) page; this makes for the spaciousness McLellan’s work demands—its staggered margins in prose and verse; its brackets and erasures; its play with received and invented forms. “Narrative,” which begins with most words in its first nine stanzas crossed out, continues with a series of double columns that can be read both left to right and vertically:

But a few pages deeper, the two columns read separately; blank space isolates words in each column and one column from the other, while section divides from section:

The book’s visual qualities reinforce and echo McLellan’s language in a gorgeous synesthesia, and the publisher’s precision allows each nuance to come through.

The Granite State Poetry Prize will be awarded annually to a collection of extraordinary quality by a New Hampshire poet. In choosing Kevin McLellan’s Sky. Pond. Mouth. for its debut publication, the prize honors both a beautiful object and a brilliant excursion into the nuance of how thinking feels, and the trajectory of how feelings emerge, in the aftermath of loss.

Joyce Peseroff's sixth book of poems, Petition, was named a "must-read" by the 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards. She is the editor of Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Her poems and reviews appear in Arrowsmith Journal, On the Seawall, Plume, and on her blog, So I Gave You Quartz. She directed the MFA program at UMass Boston in its first four years.

What Small Sound

by Francesca Bell

(Red Hen Press, 2023) 

Reviewed by Dion O’Reilly

What Small Sound: Francesca Bell’s Radical Acceptance 
Francesca Bell, who has been writing luminous poems for decades, published her sophomore poetry collection, What Small Sound. As in her debut, Bright Stain—also from Red Hen Press—Bell studies the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, violence, loss, sex, and beauty. Bell’s speaker grapples with varieties of loss as her hearing fails and her children struggle. At every step, she plumbs depths of grief, often framing it with excruciating beauty, bringing her losses into sharp relief. Finally, the speaker appears to sit quietly, to breathe into her mix of pain and pleasure, to accept what she cannot change.
 
The text opens with a tough poem with a lovely name, “Jubilations.” The first line tells us, “Every two minutes, an American woman is raped.” Sexual assault happens in the time it takes to “tear / this organic tomato to its pulpy center and bite in, / letting juice run down my chin, stinging.” For five more stanzas, acts of violence are braced against moments of joy and appetite, but the final image, with a nod to Whitman, settles the argument: “OMG. OMG.” says the speaker, “Thank You for this world of green grass and suffering.” 

“Jubilations” sets the book's tone, a kind of radical acceptance, an existential openness that is acutely aware of both trauma and ecstasy. Often, the final lines of her poems enact this acceptance, as in “Proofs,” where another mother contemplates her helplessness to save her son: 

    No woman who had lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her 
    could have said, Let it be done to me according to your word. 

    Had she felt life unfurl inside her, or a child tear its way out, and then waited, 
    a wide wound, as her body closed, she would never have said, 

    Give me the child already nailed in place, destined to run with the scissors of His         life
    

    pointed up. Let Him breach like a great whale beneath the dome of my stretched-        taut 
    skin and force His way out of this slit husk. Behold. 
       

    I am the handmaid of the Lord. His strange carapace. 
    

    The useless shell that cannot save him. 

In this poem, awareness of parental helplessness is brought into the archetypal, the mythic, zooming out to wider history and culture, which is not only poetry’s great work, but also a way to grapple with unthinkable loss. As always, the speaker acknowledges physical pleasure—if not god-like awe—that may precede or exist alongside hardship. Despite the mother’s archetypal suffering and ambivalence, she has “lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her.” 

Other poems in the collection are more focused in the first-person voice of the speaker. As in “Right to Life,” which appears shortly before the poem above and is in conversation with it: 

        It’s like hiring a hitman 
        —Pope Francis on abortion 

    I know what you are, 
                little hitman, little cherub, 

    snuck up into me, 
                swum past my barriers, 

    implanting like a movie mobster who 
                takes a person hostage from the inside. 

    You merely tap your unformed foot, 
                and my body bursts into symphony, 

    blood volume cranked dizzingly up 
                breasts swelling in fiery crescendo. 

    Nausea slams me forward, 
                just like your father liked me: 

    a body bent double to take him. 
                I’m on my knees, little one, surrendered,

    vomit heaving out of me like prayers. 
                I know, O, I know the life you’ve come for. 

Of course, the central idea is philosophical. The pope sees abortion as murder, but becoming a mother—as we have seen with Mary’s “carapace”—is also a kind of death, a kind of possession, a taking, even from the moment of conception. Many women acknowledge the joy of sex and the glorious aspects of pregnancy, how the body “bursts into symphony,” yet still sense a parasitic possession, similar to the “implanting like a movie mobster who / takes a person hostage from the inside.” Seen that way, abortion is a form of self-defense. Here, still, there is a brand of acceptance, perhaps a lack of agency in the face of deific fate, as the speaker is on her “knees … surrendered, // vomit heaving out of [her] like prayers.” 

This speaker relents to harsh realities, finding ways to express the difficulty (and sometimes joy) of being shoved against the immutable. Whether it is facing hearing loss in the titular poem “What Small Sound,” where Bell exquisitely compares approaching deafness to the spectral moons of Jupiter, and “bears witness to this deafness / that expands imperceptibly, the way the universe, they say / is expanding.” Or when discussing her daughter’s return from the mental hospital in “Taking Your Place,” the speaker admits she is irrevocably altered—perhaps possessed—by her daughter’s illness and suicidal ideation, saying, “But though you’ve returned, / I’m not coming back.” This helplessness and openness in the face of what is works well when contemplating the realities of motherhood, aging, illness, and death. As devastating as it might be, we understand we often cannot change our children’s suffering, cannot stop them from doing their worst. Indeed, constructing incisive metaphors and narratives from such experiences is a way to wield some control through deeper understanding. 

At one point, Bell’s narrator wields this acceptance, this lack of agency, while contemplating stereotypes of social-justice culture. In “Containment,” a syntactically masterful one-sentence prose poem, the speaker enacts a fragile inner narrative in the face of imagined, tweet-like accusations of her white culpability. 

    When the man sat down next to me at Starbucks, need coming off of him like a        pheromone, I was quiet, having read, more than once, God save me from the        well-meaning white woman, for he was a person of color—I wasn’t sure which        color, but not a fucking white person like me—and maybe I was profiling him,        maybe I was an asshole and had already offended the black woman who said I         could share the table but packed up her things when I sat down, leaving me to        chew my dry, multigrain bagel thoroughly like the stereotype it was … until the        man asked quietly, from his place to my side, if I could buy him a cup of coffee,     his face open the way a wound is open … I worried he was hungry, my son is        always hungry … I had an appointment to get to and handed him twenty dollars     from the stack in my purse and heard him order coffee and his bagel with cream     cheese, and the black woman came back and sat down just as I walked out, my     tears overflowing like clichés. 

Perhaps this could be an opportunity to challenge or explore social containment, the speaker’s feelings of helplessness in the face of it. It can feel like people are defined by their mistakes, ostracized, more than ever, and that is terrifying. After all, all of us— caught in a racist system—are more than clichés, but the speaker’s fears combined with the current divisive milieu have transformed a seemingly benign situation into something nefarious. 

It is easy to see how the poems in What Small Sound speak to each other as the speaker grapples with accepting what happens to her and the ones she loves. The speaker comes to terms with different modes of nurturing, the marks that giving leaves on the giver, and how we are shattered by life and reformed. Perhaps my favorite moment of radical acceptance occurs in one of the final poems, “Perimenopause,” where the aging female speaker shaves her chin—as many older women do—while contemplating her changing mind and body, both of which are increasingly prone to break open, her “tears / unchanneled and at the slightest provocation.” 

    Last week, in the produce aisle, a man 
    I’ve never been drawn to hugged me, 
    his hands warm the way a pilot light 
    is warm, its staid flicker merely dependable 
    in the dusty window of a hot water heater, 
    but I danced to life like a kerosene 
    slick touched by the sweet carelessness 
    of a match and stood there, helplessly burning. 

Francesca Bell’s speaker is often ‘helplessly burning’ in the fires of life; in the heat of pleasure; and in the unthinkable pain of death, aging, sexual violence, or a child’s mental illness. These poems are a lesson in crafting the “sweet carelessness of the world” to remain, despite everything, completely alive to it.