single window

By Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman's third collection, single window is a hybrid memoir of poetry and images.
One an amputee with chronic pain, the other suffering from Crohn's Disease and Fibromyalgia, Daniel Sluman and his wife Emily found the year of 2016 almost untenable. Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them.
single window is an incomparable, uncompromising and starkly-realised sequence of poems in the form of a journal, which bear witness to the loneliness and fear experienced by disabled people living in Tory Britain. Through a precise, hyper-confessional fusion of poetry and photography, this book details the realities of disabled lives, exploring intimacy and unconditional love as well as isolation and confinement, and documenting a world that many people otherwise never see.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913437244

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.

Book preview

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single window

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single window

Daniel Sluman

ISBN: 978-1-913437-23-7

eISBN: 978-1-913437-24-4

Copyright © Daniel Sluman, 2021.

All photographs © Daniel Brenchi-Sluman and Emily Brenchi-Sluman, 2021 and published with full permission and consent. All photographic and image rights reserved.

Cover artwork concept © Daniel Sluman. Layout: Jane Commane.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Daniel Sluman has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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for Emily   always

CONTENTS

autumn

winter

spring

summer

Image Descriptions

About the author and this book

autumn

we watch documentaries on mute

from the sofa we’ve lived in

for the last eight months

the frames crash over us

the colours

the names

the stories rip          & merge

& we don’t sleep or we sleep

all day

when we finally pull back the curtain

a slant of rain is leaning

against the road

slick with rotting leaves

autumn smoulders everything

back to its roots

spoils it

to a hazy gauze

of yellows & browns

we count down the