Pain Scale

In Pain Scale, pain is not an event but a recurrence--an aftershock that reshapes the body, memory, and the contours of a life. These poems move through a body that will not fully recover, a childhood that cannot be returned to, and a marriage that has ended but not disappeared.

Drawing on the language of medicine, myth, and domestic life, Colleen S. Harris traces what persists: fatigue, inflammation, grief, desire. Doctors' offices and quiet rooms become sites of reckoning, where the body is both battleground and archive. Endurance here is neither heroic nor redemptive--it is simply necessary.

Pain Scale attends to what remains: the altered self, the changed home, the heat still held beneath the surface. It is a meditation on living with what does not heal cleanly, and on learning how to stand inside that knowledge without looking away.