Sacred Scar is a luminous, unflinching collection of poems that moves effortlessly between the sacred and the everyday. Drawing on the lives of saints, pioneers, ancestors, and the poet’s own family, Scott Hales explores the way faith, memory, and suffering shape a human life. These poems travel from ancient deserts to modern suburbs, from battlefield soil to baptismal fonts, revealing how holiness can emerge from pain, curiosity, humor, and the fragile work of living. With a storyteller’s eye and a historian’s care, Hales invites readers into a space where past and present speak to each other in striking, unforgettable ways.
At once intimate and expansive, Sacred Scar is a meditation on belief—how it breaks, heals, transforms, and returns. Whether confronting grief, wrestling with doubt, or celebrating the strange grace of ordinary days, Hales writes with compassion, wit, and a deep reverence for the human impulse to remember.
Scott Hales 