Pain Songs

‘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.’

-- Lisa Kelly

‘Daniel Sluman’s Pain Songs are compositions of profound generosity, which invite us to dwell in the intimate recesses of lives lived with and through chronic pain. Here, experiences of being ‘in pain’ are embodied, elemental, connective and communicative. Nowhere before have I found the politics and erotics of the shared lives of pained bodies so tenderly and intricately rendered. At once specific and expansive, Pain Songs is a sublime work by a writer of monumental gifts.‘

-- Elinor Cleghorn

‘These poems are filled with great detail and rightness in their observation of a world that must be held carefully, one that always threatens to spill and break. The remedy is this: bodies tending with great care to the lives of others, to the loved bodies of others, to the house that is a home, to the own body that is also a home. In its evocation of pain and love as commingling, as cohabiting states, Pain Songs is compelling.’

-- Martha Sprack