paper • 104 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-51-2
Add to Cart
Watch the Book Trailer
Furs Not Mine won the 2016 Golden Crown Award for Poetry, and was selected by Lloyd Schwartz for The Artery’s (WBUR) “Fiction, Biography, Poetry And More — The Best Books Of 2015” list.
“Bargain” from Furs Not Mine was featured on The Slowdown, hosted by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.
Furs Not Mine
Andrea Cohen
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.
“Breaking and Entering,” from Furs Not Mine:
The notion of the home invasion is mostly myth. Mostly we leave ourselves unlocked, say to a stranger: honey, come on in. Mostly the home invasion is an inside job: your interiors get ravaged and pointing a finger, you mean to seek damages. I left the window open, told the guard dogs to roll over. He pinched my last candlesticks. If he'd asked, I'd have filled them with fire, I'd have packed his candle- lit supper to go, for the long, sorry night he was entering.