Reviewed by Michael Northen
Content Warning: Some graphic language
When Descartes announced his famous cogito ergo sum, he might equally have said, “I am in pain, therefore, I am.” While almost everything else can be denied or proved illusionary, the fact that one feels pain is something that no one can refute.
Daniel Sluman’s title choice for his latest book, Pain Songs, is a felicitous one. It announces that this book will be neither a jeremiad nor a distanced objective probing, but that it will contain the full range of emotions just as a song does.
I’ll say it flat out, I love this book. It retains some of the characteristics one has come to associate with Sluman’s work such as efficiency of language, fluid use of space, and focus on physical details, but in Pain Songs one feels those skills they first encountered in Absence has a weight of its own coming to fruition. The opening lines of book’s first poem, “Heatwave, 2021,” sets the tone for the rest of the book: “neighbours argue & fuck/ through the thirty degree heat” (p. 9). It establishes the physicality and the emotion-fueled senses that carry through the remainder of the book. Even those not in the middle of a heat wave while reading it will begin to feel themselves in the room where Sluman and his partner spend most of their time.
From the notion of the atmosphere of discomfort itself, “Atopic Dermatitis,” the second poem of the book, leads us towards Sluman’s own experience of pain:
just like the trees that burst apart
in long summers like these
dismantling the forest’s quiet joy
I have found my body breaking
over basins
& bathroom floors
my nails at my flesh
as the blood rises to the surface (p. 110)
With the third poem, “Chronic,” the poet brings us to what may be the book’s thesis. It is at once an aubaude, a hymn and a plea for faith, a poem that deserves a much fuller explication that I am giving it here.
god whispered in my ear
but the only word I caught
was pain …
as the lit nerve stirs my body
into meaning each morning
it begins
like a murmur
gathers itself
into a loose gust pushing
the window open (p. 13)
Pain, then becomes not just something a body endures, but the thread of what one is. Many of us imagine each morning as a rebirth, but for Sluman the essence of the rebirth is pain. These poems are songs not laments and, unexpectedly, he asks us:
how do I explain
how lucky I am
to be the husk this life passes through (p. 14)
Sluman has taken the spiritual and instantiated it in the physical, not as a ghost in a machine but as what is holy in itself. It is upon this footing that he is able to build a foundation for faith:
& if there is faith
it is the faith required
to keep waking inside
this immovable reality
This ache that tells me
to love loudly
the body on fire (p. 14)
In the next series of poems, Pain Songs sings us through many of the medical experiences associated with pain bearing titles such as “On Leaving the Pain Clinic,” “MRI,” “Surgery,” and “Post Surgery.” All of these poems maintain the crisp, clear cadences suited to mechanical processes that have frequently been described by disabled writers, but at the same time Sluman is able to imbue these experiences with the opportunity for understanding, so that the poems are not mere critiques. As he says in “Surgery”:
& the truth is
my body
has never made more sense
Than when I’m not
inside it. (p. 24)
In the same poem, these lines contrast magnificently with
the layers of fat rippling
in the golden light
either side of my spine. (p. 24)
To this point in the book, Sluman has described the experiences as though happening to him as an individual, but with his poem “Matching Tattoos,” he introduces his partner Emily, to whom the book is dedicated, and she continues the journey with him through almost all of the poems in the remainder of the book. What is particularly remarkable is the way that these poems explore the mutual caring of two people with disabilities and medical issues. It is a relationship not frequently explored in poetry, and certainly not as extensively as Sluman’s poems do. They range from “Honeymoon” to the penultimate poem, through poems such as “Ovulation cycle twenty-two” and “What you carry.” One of the most striking images is achieved in the poem “Corpse flower,” but others such as “Making love for cripples” and “Still life, in bed” describe the reality of this couple’s relationship. These are no-holds-barred in their descriptions of the difficulties that both attend and strengthen the relationship. Ultimately, however, these poems, and the book itself, are hopeful ones:
& still you turn to me
in joy & pain
because that’s what love is
falling always
into the soft mirror
or the other. (p. 63)
The book’s final poem, “Heatwave, 2022,” mirrors the book’s opening poem. This attention to the structure of the book is felicitous in itself, but what really makes this ending work is that those who have been reading straight through the Pain Songs now bring an understanding of how living under physically oppressive conditions can also give rise to hope and joy. Yes, it is still “the hottest day on record,” one in which “we barely lifted a finger” (p. 74), but it also allows Sluman to say:
for once pain was not our god
whatever this was
it was the opposite (p. 75)
It is because of this poem (among others) that Sluman is able to call his book “Pain Songs” and not simply “Pain Poems.”
Though it seems like an unlikely comparison, there are ways in which Sluman’s work is reminiscent of that of the American poet Larry Eigner. True, Eigner would never reference his disability, while Sluman brings his experience as a disabled man right to the fore, but both of them worked within the experience their disability permitted to create poetry. In Eigner’s case, it was whatever he was able to observe from his wheelchair on the porch or looking outward from a window. For Sluman, it is creating poetry that has to draw from living in the small spaces of his house, principally from the bedroom. In both cases, the poets adjusted their language to reflect their experience, using almost minimalist language and paying careful attention to white space and placement of lines on the page. As Jennifer Bartlett has pointed out in her biography of Eigner, Sustaining Air, Eigner went at lengths to deny that his physical disability affected the style he had developed. Sluman, on the other hand, has made a point of embracing the physical restraints under which he is writing. The result is that he has created his own remarkable style and demonstrated what disability poetry has to contribute to the world of poetry in general.
Like Sluman’s previous books, Pain Songs was published by Jane Commane and Nine Arches Press. Nine Arches deserves credit for continuing to support and make available the work of disabled writers, including the important anthology Stair and Whispers of which Daniel Sluman was one of the editors. Wordgathering is not usually in the habit of rating books, but I would have to give Pain Songs five stars.
Title: Pain Songs
Author: Daniel Sluman
Publisher: Nine Arches Press
Date: 2026
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About the Reviewer
Michael Northen is an editor of the disability poetry anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press), and the anthology of disability writing, Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, 2026). A book of his poetry, The Only One in the Room in White Socks, was published in July 2026 by Finishing Line Press.