The Perfect Pet is a new book about a visit to Happy Farm, where readers will find one-of-a-kind animals with unique talents and personalities. The Perfect Pet will introduce children to a host of whimsical characters like Charlie the Cheetah, Finley the Llama from Old Yokohama, Leona the Lioness, Wally the Whale and their friends. Each page is wonderfully illustrated with bright vivid colors that animate the story.

The Perfect Pet: Finding a pet that is dear to your heart

Children's Books

Cantor, Donald

Cantor, Michael

Animals

Wiggles Press

Life in the Second Circle is the first collection from Michael Cantor, finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. Cantor's poetry globe-trots in time and place. It teems with such culturally diverse characters and scenes as Genghis Khan and Muhammad Ali; a pithy mise-en-scène of a Venice travelogue; Brighton Beach in Florida and its natives or turistas; and what can happen in Japan on tatami mats or behind shoji screens, whether you’re a geisha or samurai or gaijin. His themes span the mystical to the hard-edged and “badass,” fluently deployed in formal poems in received or nonce forms and free verse. From the narrative to the imagistic and even the surreal, Cantor's versecraft is eclectic, brimming with wit and wisdom, and realized with the craft of a master storyteller. He has created a collection of unique pleasures not to be missed. PRAISE FOR LIFE IN THE SECOND CIRCLE: Dante’s second circle of hell was reserved for sins of lust, but Cantor’s narrator does not judge his infernal cast of characters; rather, he causes us to identify with their essential human neediness. What’s more, he does so through a cinematic gift for storytelling and a mastery of poetic form. – Julie Kane Michael Cantor uses words to paint and sculpt the world. He writes the world too―which I don’t say as an afterthought, since verbal wit is Cantor’s forte. Life in the Second Circle is a sensory kaleidoscope where the poems are more like movies. – Deborah Warren (from the “Foreword”) To be called “a poet’s poet” passes for a compliment among poets. Michael Cantor is another, rarer kind of poet―let’s say “a novelist’s poet.” This poet knows things that writers of fiction know about writing, and that other poets ignore at their peril. This extraordinary collection is testament to his unaffected generosity and genuine interest in other people, qualities that make him good company in person and in print. – Alfred Nicol This is not your mother’s book of poems. – Wendy Videlock Like Muhammad Ali, one of the “Box Men” he celebrates in a virtuosic crown of sonnets, Cantor is a master of floating like a butterfly in a small, roped-off space. In his hands the most formidably difficult forms―villanelles, triolets, Petrarchan sonnets, sestinas, ballades, and equally rigorous stanzas of his own invention―become spurs to imaginative freedom. Like the vividly drawn characters who populate Life in the Second Circle, we are constantly reminded that one never knows where life will go, or how or when or where. But it’s a pleasure to be along for the ride. – Catherine Tufariello ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Cantor’s work has appeared in Measure, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, Umbrella, SCR, Margie, Chimaera and numerous other journals, e-zines and anthologies. His honors include the New England Poetry Club Erika Mumford (2006) and Gretchen Warren (2008) Prizes. He has been a finalist or semifinalist in the Howard Nemerov, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur and Morton Marr Award competitions. A chapbook, The Performer, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Europe and Latin America, and now lives on Plum Island, MA.

Life in the Second Circle: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Able Muse Press

Herrmann the Great - A Journey through Media

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

lulu.com

If Michael Cantor’s Furusato (Japanese for “Home Town”) were only a dazzling display of formal verse at its most polished and expert, that in itself would make it worth owning and reading many times over. Its triolets, Asian forms, sestinas and experimental hybrids are as aesthetically satisfying as they are daring. But these poems are so much more that the reader ends by taking their miraculous skill for granted and focusing entirely on the dry, almost cruel humor with which they convey what “home” means, and how experience lived in our various homes shapes us, and then go on to create characters and narratives impossible to forget. The collection ends with a handful of masterpieces—“On Rolfe’s Lane,” “Lament,” “The Historian,” and “Clever,” among many others earlier in the book—that outdo and outweigh the craftsmanship you will have forgotten to notice by then. 
—Rhina Espaillat
Michael Cantor’s poems in Furusato weave a mesmerizing story, a black-and-white film, that takes us to Japan, Manhattan, Santa Fe, and unnamed foreign cities, following a sometimes there, sometimes not urbane mystery man who is at home everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Furusato means “where my people lived, the place/that we are from; my ancestors lie here,” and Cantor explores this theme beautifully and hauntingly. He uses form, free verse, Japanese stanzas and his own invented forms masterfully to introduce characters looking for their own homes: Sushi Sue, Tina the pole dancer, Bernie Madoff, Russian spies, and a somewhat older Rick and Ilse, meeting one last time in Casablanca. And at last we are granted a glimpse into his own furusato—his youth in the Bronx and his emotional home on the fictional Plover Island. For all of us traveling through life, Cantor’s poems are a gift from a poet with the intelligence, wit, self-awareness, and insight to help us recognize our own furusato. 
 —Midge Goldberg
Michael Cantor's second book, Furasato, delivers what his readers have come to expect: fresh narratives, formal invention, a passion for all things Japanese, and imaginative attention to the details of his worlds. Furasato manages to be both timely and timeless.—A.M. Juster

FURUSATO

Kelsay Books

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Books by Cantor, Michael