Pain Songs

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back and he has three previous poetry collections published by Nine Arches Press. His most recent book, single window, was released in 2021 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

‘Pain Songs is the most compelling love story I have read – or rather absorbed – in a poetry collection. It is erotic, soulful, tender, and gets under the skin like flesh under fingernails. No element is excluded in this relationship that explores the reality and the beauty of living and loving with chronic painand disability. At times you don’t know whose body is whose, the embodiment of a couple is so complete. The lines/lyrics drip onto the page in their sinuous form, as if the paper is porous, just waiting to soak up the broken music. The intense filmic quality is at once intimate and conceptual, as if the poems are washed in blue moonlight. Motifs of blood, skin,light, tissues, spit, makeup, and even chip grease are underscored by the pain that is intrinsic to this “messy life”. The welcome outcome of a positive pregnancy test is acknowledged not as inevitable, but as another element of the story that holds multiple possibilities where the site of experience is always the body. Its vulnerability is mapped against the pressures and realities of existence; and love manifests, not in opposition to, but in harmony with precarity and vulnerability, like the Greenland shark that “follows/ the only journey she can.’