Austin Poetry Review: Tell us about your recent work.
Colleen Harris: My most recent poetry collection is The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), and focuses on the light and dark sides of the American family, and how we carry our formative years with us. The collection traces the path of a family from a young marriage and then through a daughter’s eyes as she ages and starts to recognize the fractures at work within a blue-collar family. [For the below I focus on this book, but this summer I also had two chapbooks come out: Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current press) on themes of grief and chronic illness, and The Girl and the Gifts (bottlecap Press), which focuses on themes of how mythology is wound through my family history and the landscapes i’ve lived in. It’s been a very fruitful year!]
APR: Share a 3-10 line excerpt from one of your poems that you feel encapsulates your style.
CH: I like to think my style is accessible and focused – an invitation for folks to slow down and think about a moment with me, and what happens in that space of extreme attention. The last few lines of my poem “Things I Learned When You Left”:
Fitting a large bed with a skyworth of sheets is a chore best done by two. Mostly, I’ve learned that silence is a living, pulsing, purple thing, and that I cannot surprise myself with my own touch in the dark.
APR: What themes or ideas do you find yourself returning to in your poetry?
CH: I find myself returning to themes of the unlived life, how broken promises echo through family, and as I continue to come to terms with my own chronic illness, I work with themes of grief and the body quite often.
APR: Who are some poets or writers who have influenced you?
CH: Too many to count! If I could only choose a handful, the poets would be Kathleen Driskell, T. S. Eliot, Kim Addonizio, Pablo Neruda, T.J. Jarrett. I also had the grand good fortune to study under Jeanie Thompson, Molly Peacock, and Earl Braggs, so I often hear their voices in my head when I am revising my work. I have dog-eared copies of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town all over my apartment, and I own most of the books Catherynne M. Valente has written because her prose is so lush it feels like poetry.
APR: What are you hoping to explore in your writing next?
CH: Right now I am awaiting the release of Babylon Songs, a collection of personal poems in the voices of inconvenient women forthcoming as a fine press limited edition from First Bite Press in 2026. I’m finalizing two new manuscripts, “The Discipline of Drowning,” my fifth collection which just won the 2025 Broken Tribe Press Poetry Book Award and is forthcoming in summer 2026), and FLARE, a poetry collection focused on themes of chronic illness and grief which will be out of Cynren Press. For my next projects, which I am already chipping away at, I’d like to focus on mother-daughter relationships, and on how myths live and breathe alongside us in contemporary life.
