Michael Cantor’s new book, Furusato, is due out in September, 2019, from Kelsay Books.

Michael Cantor’s first full-length collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the Able Muse Prize and 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry.  A chapbook, The Performer, was published in 2007.  His work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, frogpond, New Walk, Think, Light, and numerous other journals and anthologies. A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Latin America and Europe; and presently divides his time between Plum Island, MA, and Santa Fe, NM. 

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