Overview
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.
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