In her fourth poetry collection, At Risk, Teresa Cader reflects on suffering, survival, and the defiant force of love—what Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska identified in herself as "rapture and despair." Many of Cader's poems bear familial witness to the same brutal historical landscape and its forced immigration; others explore risks to self, identity, and survival in contemporary America. All are linked by a compassionate imagination, stunning imagery, wit, sonic beauty, and Cader's characteristically striking juxtapositions: Homer appears in a peacock on the poet's sun deck; Bruno Schulz talks back to Elon Musk about colonizing Mars; in 1913 an infant is sent through the mail for 15 cents; a Polish cousin released from Auschwitz conjures his love as an alabaster figurine on the sea. Masterful in metrical, free, and formal verse, At Risk reminds us of the threats to our survival and the sources of our resilience in a lyric voice of distinctive power.
Teresa Cader is the author of four poetry collections, including Guests, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize (Ohio State), as well as The Paper Wasp (Northwestern) and History of Hurricanes (Northwestern), named a "Must Read Book" by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her work has been translated into Polish and Icelandic.
"This is a book about the violence that lives in history, in memory, and, as unending possibility, in our daily lives. But this is also a book about love and family legacy, about how our histories—as individuals, as citizens, as immigrants—inhabit our presents. Teresa Cader is a truly ambitious poet, a poet whose eye may be toward the past, but whose sensibilities and concerns have everything to do with our collective present. Smart, witty, and ambitious, AT RISK is a real marvel." — Kevin Prufer, Author of ten poetry collections and winner of the Rilke Prize for American Poetry.
"For a poet to write poems of witness in a way that combines memorable speech with truth-telling, she must possess a cold eye, poetic acumen, and enormous heart. Teresa Cader is just such a poet, betraying all three of these qualities throughout At Risk. In poem after poem, she succeeds with courage and essential details—what Czelaw Milosz called 'immense particulars'-- in witnessing to the twentieth century facts of 'man handing on misery to man,' as well as to the pervasive fractures that manifest in the world around her. 'Today I see sooty scars in the bark,' she writes at the end of her poem, 'River Birch,' 'I will call/ an arborist—but maybe I see brokenness everywhere.' This 'vision' instills her poems, along with their other myriad strengths, with heart-breaking pathos. At Risk couldn't have arrived on the door-step of our time at a more propitious moment." — Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont
