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. 

Drift Migration

by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
(Ashland Poetry Press, 2021) 

Reviewed by Michael McLane

The constituent parts of Danielle Beazer Dubrasky’s collection Drift Migration are, in equal measure, myth and sand. From the retelling of lost loves in the section “Eurydice’s Mirror” to the sandstone compacted over millions of years in Utah and Arizona, from Arachne and the Sand Man to the glint of first sun on the desert, timeless things impose themselves again and again on everyday life and loss in these poems. Labyrinths and their endless choices, made or abandoned, shape Drift Migration, as well. They appear as a book of Borges in the Daedalus Bookshop in her childhood home of Charlottesville, Virginia, as red rock canyons of her adopted Utah home, and as her mother unraveling as if thread, “into remnants we skirt around / to disappear each into our own labyrinth.” At the heart of each, laying in wait to devour reader and speaker whole, is time. It is scaled up and scaled down—the slow unfurling of creosote and fossils in desert rock, myths born a few millennia ago, or the passing of half a century of loss. Whether deep and geologic or the cycle of seasons, miniature or sublime, its appetite remains bottomless, at times monstrous. 

Dubrasky’s poems bring all these varied scales to bear upon lives diverted or blown off course in unexpected ways, as the drift migration of the book’s title suggests, and in its finest moments, superimposes them upon one another in ways that offer up our stories of ourselves, our history, and our planet in a constant state of subversion and revision, at times fragmenting in real time. In “Winter Solstice in the Gorge,” Dubrasky begins:

Our myths turn long nights into cut evergreen

sold on grocery store parking lots, a continent away

from reindeer starving as the Arctic ice dissolves.

Only one star guides the way for diesels lit like Christmas—

miles of commerce that thread the Mojave.

Later in the poem, the face of Norse goddess Freya appears in red rock and dawn comes to a standstill “on a plateau of Kaibab sediment.” Myth rests on the surface of the land like the highway itself, a tangle of desires and needs, a route in constant need of repair and revision at mercy to powers and spectacle beyond our understanding.  

Likewise, in the book’s opening poem, “Phosphenes,” Dubrasky explores the eponymous flashes of light behind our eyelids, maneuvering from the ocean’s photic zone to “starlings in murmuration over fields in autumn” to a prisoner in solitary confinement, their loss of time and its concept manifesting in dreams and hallucinations, “phantom light projected / by cells firing in the retina.” “Phosphenes” is a perfect segue to the first section of the book, titled “The Sand Man,” its last line disappearing “around a curve through the only passage you have ever known.” This is fitting not only because of the importance of the eyes (as well as sleep and dreams) to nearly all versions of traditional Sand Man myths, whether they be the malicious or the innocuous iterations, but because Dubrasky’s version of the Sand Man is in many respects a founding myth of her life, the way in which she navigates the death of her brother which, despite her dreaming him back to existence in various ways, remains a crucible, the only passage she has ever known. The section begins with the title poem, which locates the reader immediately in the harsh desert where the Sand Man dwells:

A billboard: Stardust Motel. The exit sign: Valley of Fire.

Sand and creosote, broken bottles sparkling before his head

smashes the windshield near rows of telephone poles.

His name thrives in a desert as open as the sky

that rains down dry-throated gullies, soaks cleft mud flats.

His name lies flat on the grass near a copper vase filled

with flowers where the road ends in wind and Joshua trees. 

The poems that follow, including the ten-part poem “The Sand Man” that makes up the bulk of the section, move in and out of the siblings’ childhood in Char-lottesville, where they are happy if distant, and a revisioning of Hansel and Gretel, a desert dreamscape or hallucination where the Sand Man is a witch both beneficent and cruel:

He spins music on a turntable, snaps a dance with his fingers,

Pulls a rainbow of scarves through a ring, shades them from the sun 

[ … ]

He pours fire down the brother’s throat

and leaves him pushing grit between his teeth.

While the sister sleeps he steals her eyes

so when she wakes years later

she can’t see the split

he left in her heart.

The timelines conflate repeatedly and it is unclear how much of the speaker’s life with her brother is real and how much imagined. This is part of the Sand Man’s modus operandi, “he appears as an ordinary man taking an evening walk / except for the small bag of sand he carries. // He looks at her as though no time has passed, / as though there is not one where there were two.” Time is cruel, or at the very least indifferent, and Dubrasky perceives the desert in much the same way, at least in the early poems of the book, though there are glimmers of changes ahead, a drift towards a desert time and mindset that encompasses these more immediate losses into something both larger and more delicate. In part ten of “The Sand Man,” she writes:

There are some who wait all their lives to see

The Queen of the Desert bloom at midnight…

Heady perfume opens across the desert

And she sees them all now:

Ghost flower, evening snow, Venus shooting star.

Their grace thrives despite the arid soil. 

She feels more than sees the moon-white petals

Expand in her dark place of sand and blood. 

This is not a change that occurs without many adjustments, as later poems such as “Leaving Virginia” make clear when Dubrasky describes how “Utah houses soften their angles at dusk, / hollyhocks blend with the larkspur. / Women disappear behind graciousness—a smile that tells nothing.” Later in the same poem where the Sand Man and the glass around her brother’s accident are recalled in “the grid streets of a Mormon town. / My first night in the desert, / stars I had only glimpsed through / a humid haze now glitter bright as ice.” But by the time the reader reaches the book’s final section, “Vespers in the Great Basin,” her now longtime home has changed, has unfurled in its impossibly slow way, the remnants of a now-extinct inland sea revealing themselves, as in “Retrieval,” where “in another epoch, creatures in limestone / will taste this new salt abrading / their locked beds—a trail toward home,” or in “Great Basin,” where “the sea left behind is the desert I walk through, / a sorrow slipped between trilobites and shale.” 

While old myths abound in Dubrasky’s work, their contemporary counterparts arise and revise and unravel with the same elegance and heartache as anything in the stories of Eurydice or Arachne. In “One Shot,” she describes going with her family to The Deer Hunter, the theater so crowded they are forced to scatter around the room with the speaker seated next to men who “laughed at the Viet Cong soldiers screaming at De Niro / to pull the trigger in Russian Roulette” only to find that, “when the last scene closed with a toast to that town’s lost son, // the theater silent except one of the men / beside me who wept into his hands.”

The opening night of the film coincided with the suicide of writer Breece D’J Pancake, who shot himself on the property of Dubrasky’s neighbor. The film, the suicide, the war, and the stories we tell ourselves about it, they all leave the community scattered as her family in their seats, leave “a town too stunned to speak.” The night at the theater is only one of numerous moments to subvert the more idyllic memories of Dubrasky’s childhood home, a town that has more recently become infamous for more horrific events. “Daedalus Bookshop” is a poem that is both an ode to the magic of books and bookshops and elegy for innocence, its use of James Agee’s lines about Icarus, “little child take no fright / in that shadow where you are,” taking on far more tragic connotations when we learn in the notes that the shop is just down Fourth Street from the spot where Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist, on a street now named in her honor. 

As such unraveling of stories suggests, home is a nebulous concept in much of Drift Migration, a thing both mythical and literally set in (sand)stone, at once fractured and adaptable. Though Dubrasky states in “Metamorphic” that “perhaps it is too much to carry two places at once,” it doesn’t feel as if that is the end of things, that our lives are so finite or linear. The book’s final poem, “Petroglyphs at Parowan Gap” attests to this, in its assertion and its final question: 

All things crisscross before they disappear into silence

throbbing between jutted rocks…

If we live in dreams, our eyes opening and closing to vistas we create

Unless we step into someone else’s meditation, then which ancient one

Dreamt this intersection of lines—the distant trucker, the men, and myself,

who wander past a length of road into spirals so carefully engraved?

Michael McLane is the author of the chapbooks Fume and Trace Elements. He is a founding editor of the journal saltfront, the review editor for Sugar House Review, and a poetry editor for Dark Mountain. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Western Humanities Review, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, Interim, Utah Historical Quarterly, and South Dakota Review. He currently lives in rural New Zealand where he is completing a PhD at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.