Review: Toothache in the Bone by Colleen S. Harris
Colleen S. Harris’s chapbook Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current press, 2025) is not a quiet book—it is an embodied book. It insists on the body as archive, battlefield, and text. Each poem maps the griefs and small victories of living inside a body that refuses to obey, and in doing so, Harris pulls readers into the intimate spaces between pain and persistence.
What stands out immediately is the precision of her language. In I Dreamt I Was Unblemished, she writes of her own skin as “a receipt of choices made, final sale, no returns.” That blend of plain speech and devastating metaphor recurs throughout the collection, refusing to let the reader look away.
Illness here is not isolated to the self—it connects outward. Bees drowning in chlorine, orcas carrying dead calves, elephants arranging bones: Harris places her own pain in the company of other creatures, widening the frame of suffering and survival. In Some Days the Crow, she imagines herself both as the furious bird “fighting this dark-wingèd life” and as the crow itself, heavy with unwelcome shadow. These animal mirrors sharpen the human condition.
There are also moments of startling tenderness. In On Letting Go of the Dying, Harris writes about carrying her beloved basset hound Otto for the last time, grief folding into memory, love into loss. These poems acknowledge the rawness of mourning but resist collapse into sentimentality.
If the chapbook has a flaw, it lies in its directness. In poems like A Brief Biology Lesson or Primum Non Nocere (First, Do No Harm), the didactic edges can feel almost clinical. Yet even here, the clarity feels intentional: it is a refusal to disguise illness in metaphor, a statement that the body itself is poetry enough.
Ultimately, Toothache in the Bone is a work of witness. It honours the daily rituals of endurance—scheduling a hysterectomy, wearing a father’s rain slicker, planting something green in the earth—and insists that living with illness is not a diminishment of life, but a different and no less valid way of inhabiting it.
This is a chapbook for anyone who has lived in a body they did not bargain for, or loved someone who has. Harris’s voice is both personal and universal, reminding us that even in the ache of bone, poetry endures.
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. Author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent work includes The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback, 2019). Her poetry appears in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 80 others. You can find more of her work at colleensharris.com Get a copy of Tootache in the Bone here.