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 reckoning, where the body is both battleground and archive. Unsentimental and sharply observed, Pain Scale speaks to the experience of enduring what does not resolve-- offering both recognition for readers living with chronic pain and a powerful window into that reality for others.
Pain Scale