In Toothache in the Bone, Colleen S. Harris expertly peels back the layers of the human experience, showing us a wide range of emotions ranging from grief to resilience and all emotions in between, and she does so with a with a clarity that is unflinching. In poems that ache with memory and pulse with pain, Harris gives voice to the stories our bodies carry: the scars, both emotional and physical, and she does it with a tenderness and an openness that left me in awe. In “I Dreamt I Was Unblemished,” she writes, “with fat and age, skin/a receipt of choices made, /final sale, no returns,” allowing the reader to see the underbelly of her emotions – those parts that so many of us strive to hide. Harris hides nothing. In “Scheduling the Hysterectomy, Age 26,” motherhood and loss collide in an image of tricycles abandoned like “turkey buzzards / on the neighbor’s lawn.” And in the elegiac “On Letting Go of the Dying,” Harris mourns not only a beloved dog but the unraveling of a marriage. Yet even as the reader is taken through a journey of heartbreak, the collection closes with “The Labor of Birthing and Burying My Sorrow,” where sorrow is not buried to be forgotten but planted to grow into something new. Toothache in the Bone blessed me in ways I did not know I needed as I come to terms with my own seasons of sadness and loss. This book operates as a guide for those who are attempting to heal and for those whose healing journeys have already been completed. —Angela Jackson-Brown, author of House Repairs and Untethered
“The poems in Toothache in the Bone are focused, precise, deeply moving, and each sings in perfect harmony with the others. Not since the late great Galway Kinnell have I encountered a poet who meditates so profoundly and so lyrically on our limitations, while pondering the limitless beyond the confines of the body. I can’t think of a more worthy subject for poetry than to ‘transform this sorry meat into art.'” —Marlon L. Fick, author of The Tenderness and the Wood and Rhapsody in a Circle
“Colleen Harris sings of the vicissitudes of love—the heady highs and dull lows of love found and then, for good reason, walked away from—“I’ve misplaced my joy,” the poet says—all set against the steady thrum of daily life’s demands and pleasures. In these compelling and potent poems, the poet earns the right to declare, “I am weary/of all my drowning./I will keep my breath for myself.”” —Andrew Hudgins, Pulitzer Prize nominee, National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship recipient, author of Saints and Strangers and After the Lost War
“We need poems that tell family stories just for the joy and sorrow of them, for the “shiver and proof of life.” In Colleen Harris’s narrative poetic sequence The Light Becomes Us, we follow an American family’s trajectory of first love, commitment, child-rearing, spousal abuse, justice, and acceptance. If these well-made poems were adapted to film, the camera would catch alternating degrees of sunlight and haunting darkness. A sometimes clear, sometimes gritty guitar soundtrack would paint the emotions of the young daughter, the mother, and the ultimate survivor.” —Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
“Colleen Harris’s volume of poetry reveals her as a poet of the in-between, beginning with the title. It moves between two ways of reading it. Within the rich stream of themes, the power of the between shines through between love and violence, ifs and thens, spirit and flesh, caresses and collisions, past and future, mother and daughter, father and daughter, grief and grace. Colleen is a poet of wonder.” —Dennis Slattery, author of Casting the Shadows: Selected Poems and Becoming Stories: Essays and Poems on Mythic Moments
Colleen S. Harris 