AT RISK
Cader’s fourth book of poems, chosen by Mark Doty as winner of the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, is a masterful exploration of her Polish family’s legacy––war and displacement, rapture and survival. As a first-generation American, Cader is alert to those left behind by history and by the fractures of contemporary life. Compassionate, lyrical, witty, smart, and ambitious, Cader’s poems create a language that illuminates the fears and passions of a collective present fused in the heat of the past. AT RISK is a necessary, startling, and brilliant book.
—Joyce Peseroff
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
Learn MoreFor 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. In poem after poem, Teresa Cader succeeds with courage and essential details—what Czesław Miłosz 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. AT RISK couldn’t have arrived on the door-step of our time at a more propitious moment.
—Chard deNiord
