Pain Scale

In Pain Scale, pain is not a single event but a condition that reshapes the body, memory, and the contours of a life. These poems move through chronic illness, fractured relationships, and a past that cannot be recovered, tracing what persists: fatigue, inflammation, grief, and desire.

Drawing on the language of medicine, myth, and daily life, Colleen S. Harris renders the lived reality of a body that will not fully heal. Doctors’ offices, bedrooms, and ordinary routines become sites of reck...