Furs Not Mine

The poems in Furs Not Mine display Andrea Cohen’s masterful craft and lyricism and her keen wit. In Cohen’s elegiac shoals, we see how “Great griefs are antidotes / for lesser sorrows,” and in her strange, surprising narratives, we glimpse a man darting into traffic for a hubcap, “meaning to build his dream / vehicle from scrap.” These poems, too, have the feel of dreamy constructions, in which bliss “from a distance, can look like pain.” That’s the magic of this collection: it holds loss and promise in the same image—sometimes even the same word.

ANDREA COHEN is the director of The Writers House at Merrimack College and the director of The Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her awards include a PEN Discovery Award and Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award.