"Carol Kanter takes you beyond Drs. Spock and Brazelton. They tell you how to bring up the baby. She shows you how to take care of yourself, too. Interesting, provocative, and very stimulating. Kanter has written a most unusual book on merging couple's parenting responses and their reactions to their new child." -Sherman Feinstein, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry University of Chicago

"Of Water" is a chapbook of poems with a centerpiece of a heroic crown of sonnets. Carol Kanter didn't set out to write a group of pieces about water. But water must have some sort of draw on her, since when she looked through drafts of possible poems she had amassed over time, there they were. She did, however, set out to write the centerpiece Crown of Sonnets. She had stumbled on the form and it struck her as a challenge. But she had no subject matter that felt appropriate. Until she went to Ghana with friends who were engaged in building wells in rural villages. There everyone seemed so connected through the mission of improving lives that she felt the interweaving form might serve to honor them.

"Carol Kanter takes you beyond Drs. Spock and Brazelton. They tell you how to bring up the baby. She shows you how to take care of yourself, too. Interesting, provocative, and very stimulating. Kanter has written a most unusual book on merging couple's parenting responses and their reactions to their new child." -Sherman Feinstein, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry University of Chicago

Carol Kanter's Out of Southern Africa is, in one view, a bestiary that animates her encounters with a flirtatious ostrich, vigilant giraffe, and somber cape buffalo, among other dazzling occupants of the veldt- elegant and homely, comic and menacing. We embrace them all, whatever their attributes, for they are as familiar as kin in these vivid portraits that nudge us toward the understanding that they are the mirrors in which we glimpse ourselves. The title of this engaging volume directs us to place, but Kanter's is far more than a travel book. The Darwinian premise haunts these poems along with the hard questions of travel, but they, as in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, are often mitigated through an ingenious rhyme or playful turn of phrase. Whether rendering the cruel beauty of the Magkudigkudi Salt Pans, the meerkat's desert maze, or the Southern Cross blinking itself awake, these poems compel the reader, like Bishop's Miss Breen, to set out for the interior. --Paulette Roeske.

Anthology of essays, stories, and poems