the terrible

By Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman’s bleak brilliance in the terrible is a masterclass in the power of poetry to confront difficult subject matter with accuracy and painstaking openness. These are rigorous and exacting poems, that dare to go to some of the darkest places and speak with stark precision.

These poems may be stripped down, intense and utterly frank, but they are not without deep reserves of sincerity and beauty. Sluman writes of the heady cocktail of being alive, where loss, love, sex, close shaves with mortality and sharp narratives of pain and suffering are explored with concise and humane clarity.

"Daniel Sluman’s new collection explores acute and chronic, emotional and physical pain (and, albeit less often, pleasure) with a raw, compelling urgency. At times playful, at times harrowing, the terrible always brims with life." – Carrie Etter

"Vivid and honest poems of intense experience, in which no wound is too deep to be cauterised by language. " – Jean Sprackland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911027508

Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. His second collection 'the terrible' was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015. He has appeared widely in UK poetry journals and his third collection, ‘single window’, about living with disability and chronic pain, is published by Nine Arches Press in September 2021.