AT RISK, Teresa Cader’s fourth book of poems, winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize (selected by Mark Doty for Ashland Poetry Press and published this past October, 2024), is an intense beauty of a book. Its insights pointed, its closures sharp and deadly, and Cader’s righteous memory and caring, both historical and personal, are deep.
Cader divides her book into three parts. Part One consists of poems that wince at the pain and hurt of the world. These are poems where kindness is dealt out crumb-by-crumb, sometimes in staggered lines that stutter step in a patter of fear, a persistent murmur and feeling of discombobulation you can’t quite shake loose. “’I believe you,’” is all Dr. Al-Zahrawi, the “Father of Western Surgery in Tenth Century Andalusia Spain,” so the poem’s title tells us, can say to crazed “young Hasan,” raped by a goatherd “who bloodied him, stood over him, and laughed.”
These are poems of our time, but timeless in their thirst for the rhymes that history provides. That poem about the father of western surgery in tenth Century Andalusia Spain is set in the book near a poem about wild boars running wild in Fukushima, which is set near a poem that imagines Homer’s soul and the peacock kept by the poet’s Polish grandmother, who “shrieked when the Nazis/ stormed her road” (“Pythagoras Said The Soul Of Homer Moved Into A Peacock”). We feel both soothed and composted into the nightmares these poems conjure up, where wise eyes “see brokenness everywhere” (“River Birch”) and the poet explores the feelings of both the hunter and the hunted:
Catfish sailed on silver threads above my head.
Alarm rang the alarm.I snoozed. A catfish caught by a cat sizzled up
In a fry pan loaded with salt. I snoozed again.I was the cat who hunted the catfish, lugged
it home in my jaws so I could eat it.
I was the catfish in the cat’s teeth, bumped along
then dumped on the ground, praying eyes open.
The chef? That was me, too: chopping off
the catfish head, happy with my slaughter.
— The Cycle
The book’s second section is a record of the fragments of a father’s trauma. Take, for example this opening from “The Nine Children of Marianna Gluza”:
Who died before the age of eighteen torment my father
who is dead he didn’t mention them
his first cousins what does it mean if your family
erases you as a child was the grief of your death
too much to bear or were you replaceable
another bulb in the garden another late-night mattress
soaked with longing or duty another rosary
I confess it is not just my father tormented
trauma takes the tongue historians of trauma write
Brushed with details, like the one of the boy who cut off his dog’s fur the day the Nazis took away his father (“Two Potatoes and a Dog, 1939”), and using fragments and references to other writers and poets – Bruno Schultz, Amos Oz, Wislawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman – Cader provides answers to an exam on a specific period in the “History of Mankind” (“Lines by Wislawa Szymborska Rearranged as Elegy”).“ In effect, the poems in this section constitute “A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses,” as Cader writes at the end of the Szymborska poem, as she gives shape to the inherited traumas that linger afterwards. The most impressive poem in this impressive section is the poem “Immigrant Mobile, a three-page open field bit of free verse where Cader plays off of Alexander Calder’s mobiles to describe the immigrant experience:
How mobile can an immigrant be,
floating
among houses and continents
like metal made weightless,
arcing through space on a breath or a breeze?....
and what of the immobile,
left behind in the wake
of a ship leaving port?
The final section of AT RISK makes a broader use of history as well as biblical references to help make sense of the components of our present. Formally in this section, Cader makes use of more traditional forms like the ghazal (“Ghazal of the Goats”), to a wordplay that leads to revelation during Covid quarantine (“Cappuccino Quarantine”), to a sort of play off of William Carlos Williams’ triadic line in what is the most impressive poem in this section, the final poem of the book, “Urban River Run.” The poem references Thoreau, the fishing preferences of “Immigrants from the Pilgrims onward,” to the present day where the poet and her husband look down from Mystic Dam into a fish ladder filled with “Alewife river herring trying to reach/ the upper lake where seagulls loop and dive,” as well as another fish runway, this one for American eels, who have “swam 1,000 miles from the Sargasso Sea to mature here.” This five-page poem becomes a meditation on family both present and gone, and even makes a reader think of these migrations of fish as metaphors for the journeys that we all travel in our separate but collective lives. Towards the end of the poem, Cader quotes Thoreau addressing the river fish of his time: “’Keep a stiff fin, then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.’” So may we all do in our time here.
Theresa Cader published her first book of poems over thirty years ago. If she isn’t better known to you, I respectfully suggest that she should be. Cader is a poet of graceful, haunting poetic gestures and wide knowledge who has much to share and teach us. A good starting point to get better acquainted with her work is her latest book, AT RISK. I highly recommend it.
S.D. Lishan’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Measure, Phoebe, Arts & Letters, Kenyon Review, Cutbank, Creative Nonfiction, and many other journals. They’ve been a finalist for The Pushcart Prize, and their book of poetry, Body Tapestries (Dream Horse Press), was awarded the Orphic Prize in Poetry. They’re currently at work on a novel, The Witches of Clintonville and the Thieves of Birdsong. They live and write in Columbus, Ohio.