The Light Becomes Us is a collection of narrative poems exploring how the American family holds both the grace to save us and the tragedies that doom us. Poems from the perspectives of mother and daughter delve into the details of love won, lost, fought for, discarded, and retrieved. (Main Street Rag, 2025)
Toothache in the Bone is a chapbook collection of poems coalescing around themes of the everyday practice of transcending the broken bodies we are born into. (boats against the current, 2025)
The poems in The Girl and the Gifts seamlessly weave myth, legend, family history, and love of land and seascape together into a compelling collection. With an arc of self-discovery and self-determination, this collection connects mythological themes with quotidian life–a Long Island girl compares her home life with an old Irish selkie legend, trees discuss how they know Daphne after her flight from Apollo, and as she ages a girl wonders which of her inherited ancestral myths will shape her future. The poet asks us to interrogate how the family tales we inherit shape us.
These Terrible Sacraments tells a story of military deployment and its aftermath, on the soldier, the family left at home, and the family created on return. Told with frankness and told beautifully, these poems speak truth in its many facets. It is true that war is horrible. Even so, it is true that beauty remains in the world. And it is true that we must bear witness to what humanity endures and creates. Harris guides us through the journey. (Doubleback, 2019. Originally published by Bellowing Ark Press, 2011.)
Some Assembly Required is a sampling of Colleen S. Harris’s poetry dealing with motherhood, marriage, and a life shared. From reading in bed through rickety crib assembly, and the things left after children have grown, these poems are intimate moments of togetherness and separation. (Porkbelly Press, 2014)
That Reckless Sound investigates the complications of identity and relationship, the destructive next to the beautiful, the fragile touching the reckless, all bound up into one fluid experience. These poems peer through the eyes of historical & mythic (female) figures from Pandora to Magdalene, Bathsheba to Joséphine. (Porkbelly Press, 2014)
God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems is the debut poetry collection by Colleen S. Harris. A collection of monologues in the voice of the first woman created by God, Lilith, Harris explores gender roles, theodicy, and the complications of Christian faith and womanhood through poems that are at turns apologetics, feminist screeds, and a daughter’s cries to be seen by her father. (Bellowing Ark, 2009, out of print)
The Kentucky Vein amplifies the contemporary against the rural, the humanity within nature, and the identification of the deepest self with the landscapes of America’s heartland. Exploring sun burnt necks and baptisms in lakes, gossip with horses and lessons learned from tobacco and broken china, this poetry collection roots the human spirit firmly in place in the American South. (Punkin House, 2011)
Colleen S. Harris 