Baer’s debut book of poetry, What Kind of Woman, out next week, marked a return to the subject of parenthood. The book began when, while putting away the baby clothes for her third child, she found out she was pregnant with a fourth—just weeks before her husband was scheduled to get a vasectomy. Depression set in almost immediately. “I didn’t even know there was a term for it—antenatal depression, depression during pregnancy,” she says. “But I felt it immediately, as almost a chemical reaction within my body.” Even after the darkest parts of the depression lifted, Baer says, she feared for her own mental health. And so she resolved to parent her fourth child differently than she had previously: She breast-fed less, she hired more childcare, she took on part-time jobs to afford the childcare—all so that she could find time to write the poems that became What Kind of Woman. (Baer’s husband began his training to be a doctor when she had her first child. He is now completing his resi...
