Toothache in the Bone
by Colleen S. Harris
Colleen S. Harris
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, forthcoming 2025), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming 2026), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014). Harris also co-edited Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets (McFarland, 2016) and Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching (McFarland, 2012).
praise for Toothache in the Bone
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
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
