Book Description
In his fifth collection of poetry, the physician and award-winning writer Rafael Campo considers what it means to be the enemy in America today. Using the empathetic medium of a poetry grounded in the sentient physical body we all share, he writes of a country endlessly at war—not only against the presumed enemy abroad but also with its own troubled conscience. Yet whether he is addressing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the battle against the AIDS pandemic, or the culture wars surrounding the issues of feminism and gay marriage, Campo’s compelling poems affirm the notion that hope arises from even the most bitter of conflicts. That hope—manifest here in the Cuban exile’s dream of returning to his homeland, in a dying IV drug user’s wish for humane medical treatment, in a downcast housewife’s desire to express herself meaningfully through art—is that somehow we can be better than ourselves. Through a kaleidoscopic lens of poetic forms, Campo soulfully reveals this greatest of human aspirations as the one sustaining us all.
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Amazon.com
Rafael Campo, the author of The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told, is both a doctor and an important contemporary poet. In The Desire to Heal, he uses his gift for language to delineate and explicate the connections between his two vocations, writing and healing, and his roles as a gay man and an educator.Campo's topic is always the body; he understands its fragility and resistance, its power and grace. His prose is precise and poetic, and his insights are revelations. The Desire to Heal is a work of literary grace and compassion--a memoir that illuminates the world with new light and urgency.Book Description
"Rafael Campo is that rare and exotic hybrid," raved the Boston Globe, "a doctor-poet, with a sensualist point of view that leads him to explore . . . the eroticism of healing--the laying on of hands." In this "unrelenting effort to humanize the medical profession" (Publishers Weekly), Campo turns the doctor-patient relationship inside out, writing not just of his attempts to heal, but of how his patients have healed him. He writes of campy Aurora, "dying of love"; the elderly woman telling of her trip to the country to pick "big-as-your-hands" peaches; a hateful addict he wished would die; and Gary, whom he feared to love, "contentious and gossipy and irreverent." Campo's work, "reminiscent of Chekhov . . . [in] the way language comes up out of the body" (Los Angeles Times), restores "the transcendent power of language to redeem" as, throughout the book, "the narrative, and the narrator, only get more luscious" (Out).

This book was originally published in hardcover under the title The Poetry of Healing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A young doctor's journey of self-discovery
I almost didn't read this book. I was expecting a discourse on the healing power of the creative arts as an alternative therapy in medicine. Campo may write about that elsewhere, but not here. If anything, the book concerns the power of poetry for the physician in need of healing.

Campo's book is part memoir, part polemic. Chiefly, it recounts his struggles to forge a single identiy as doctor, poet, Latino, and gay man. He articulates with considerable and painful clarity the many ways in which these separate identities have been in conflict. They seem finally to come together in his role as a physician to AIDS patients. But even in that there is conflict, both with the devastating nature of the disease and the efforts of managed health care to diminish his best efforts to fulfill his calling as a doctor.

As memoir, his book retraces the steps of his life journey into his profession (at the time of the book's writing he is still a young doctor, in his early 30s). We meet his Cuban-American parents, learn of his middle class suburban background, and hear of his struggles of sexual identity, which produce in him intense shame, anger and fear. We follow him to Amherst, where he meets and falls in love with a fellow med student who becomes his life partner, and from there to residency in UCSF hospital in San Francisco. He describes his bout with suspected cancer, discovered after a skiing accident. And he tells of a patient, Gary, dying of AIDS, who teaches him much about being both a doctor and a poet.

As polemic, his book argues against homophobia (even as he overcomes it in himself) and its contribution to the continuing health crisis for gay men. He argues that the catch phrase "safe sex" diminishes the fragile self-esteem and challenges the identities of gay men. He argues that modern medicine, with its reliance on technology and pharmaceuticals and insistence on professional objectivity, robs young doctors of the compassion, empathy, and desire that drew them into the profession in the first place -- and thus makes them less effective in the delivery of health care. And he argues for the legitimacy of poetry as both a practice and a guiding metaphor for the role of physician. He notes that poetry and healing are both arts; one informs and supports the other.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the practice of modern medicine, the training and self-education of physicians, and journeys of self-discovery. It is especially affirming in its embrace of same-sex affection, love, and passion. As companion volumes, I recommend two other books: Richard Rodriguez' memoir "Hunger of Memory" and Abraham Verghese's account of his experience as an AIDS doctor, "My Own Country."

Breathtaking
Eloquent, honest, beautiful.It's obvious Campo is a poet at heart, and that he brings his poet's sensibility to his life as a physician.Although the details of this book are personal and particular (his Cuban heritage, life as a gay man, experiences caring for AIDS patients at the height of the epidemic), Campo's observations are universal.

Beautiful language, beautiful thoughts.
As a pre-med student, this book caught my interest because of its focus on the side of medicine that is internal to the physician: the medicine that works in a physician's heart and mind.Campo gives a poetic andwell-constructed testimony of his struggles and triumphs in reconciling hispersonality with the world around him and the difference between simplywanting to practice medicine and having a "desire to heal."Idefinitely recommend this to anyone with an intense desire to see thehumanity of a field that is so often seen as something sterile andimpersonal. ... Read more

Book Description
A celebrated poet and doctor connects—through favorite verses and stories from his life and practice—poetry and healing.

As a respected and much-loved doctor, Rafael Campo shares favorite poems with patients on his rounds. After all, incantation has played a role in healing for millennia, displaced only recently by modern scientific obsessions.

In this luminous book, Campo restores the link between poetry and healing, offering "pharmaceutical" samples of work by a diverse group of poets such as Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Miroslav Holub, Audre Lorde, Lucia Perillo, and William Carlos Williams. He leads us through the stages of illness and recuperation, from first inklings of mortality through symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment, and finally recovery or—and here medicine recoils but poetry perseveres—death, and even immortality.

At each stage, Campo reveals the richness of individual poems and the potent medicine they offer. Ultimately, he proposes a "biocultural" model of illness as provocative as it is humane—one that restores the art of poetry to its rightful place at the heart of a healthy society. 10 b/w illustrations. ... Read more

Book Description
In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together—just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers—into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.
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Amazon.com
Rafael Campo skillfully plays the rules of formal poetry against themselves inhis second book of poetry, the Lambda Award-winning What the Body Told. Inthese intense poems, the body tells its story of loneliness and perseverance in anunwavering voice. One might expect the confessional poetry of a gay Cuban Americanpoet to strike out in an expansive, perhaps enthusiastic mode, but Campo discovers in thesonnet plenty of room to explore questions of sexual, cultural, and professional identity.Five sonnet sequences--"Canciones de la Vida," "Canciones de laMuerte," and "Ten Patients, and Another"--form the heart of the book.These recall and try to answer each other's agonizing investigations into AIDS, desire,and the ironic distance between doctor and patient. Although the speaker is generallyinvolved in the dramatic situation, he tends to speak as an observer, limning theassumptions below the surface and exploding them with fury. In other parts of the book,Campo synthesizes two traditions of formalpoetry--the elegiac and the erotic--to create a third in such poems as "Before SafeSex," "The 10,000th AIDS Death in San Francisco," and "MenGet the Shaft."These moving and vivid poems allow the reader to grieve for AIDSvictims while simultaneously considering what it means to be healed. Despite Campo'sday job--Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School--he refuses in hispoems to play the healer; his evocative diagnoses, however, prescribe a schedule ofgentleness, understanding, and rigor to make it through this life.Book Description
What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, a gay Cuban American, and winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition. Exploring the themes begun in his first book, The Other Man Was Me, Campo extends the search for identity into new realms of fantasy and physicality. He travels inwardly to the most intimate spaces of the imagination where sexuality and gender collide and where life crosses into death. Whether facing a frenetic hospital emergency room to assess a patient critically ill with AIDS, or breathing in the quiet of his mother’s closet, Campo proposes with these poems an alternative means of healing and exposes the extent to which words themselves may be the most vital working parts of our bodies. The secret truths in What the Body Told, as the title implies, are already within each of us; in these vivid and provocative poems, Rafael Campo gives them a voice.

Lost in the Hospital
It’s not that I don’t like the hospital.
Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave.
The smell of antiseptic cleansers.
The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true.
My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out
To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s
And oxygen tanks attached to them—
A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared
A cigaratte, which was delicious but
Too brief. I held his hand; it felt
Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was,
The sunlight pointing down at us, as if
We were important, full of life, unbound.
I wandered for a moment where his ribs
Had made a space for me, and there, beside
The thundering waterfall of is heart,
I rubbed my eyes and thought “I’m lost.”


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Customer Reviews (1)

Powerful songs of suffering
The poems in this collection are powerful and intimate. Although the organization of the book could be tighter, Compo's poem address the devastating effects of AIDS and cancer on patients. Compo brings the reader into the world of the sick and reminds me that beyong our own fear of cancer and AIDS is the power of empathy. When Compo shows me the raw emotions of an woman on the edge of death, I am reminded of life and what it means to live ... Read more

Book Description
National Poetry Series winner, gay Latino ... Read more

Book Description
Word count: 2083. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Rafael Campo seems to have recognized early on that, likeWilliam Carlos Williams, his work as a physician gives him entry intowhat Williams called "the secret gardens of the self." No wonder Campo's bestpoetry has always drawn on his knowledge of the human body and his informedcompassion for the sick. But if the ghost of Williams hovers over the pages ofDiva, so does that of Walt Whitman, with his life-affirming philosophy of connection and brotherhood, and his joyous acceptance of the flesh.

Campo's third collection is arranged in five sections, the firstdrawing an imaginative map of Cuba and the poet's conflicted feelings toward his paternal homeland. In "The Dream of Loving Cuba," he writes:

It's half-erect
beneath America on all my maps--
just look at how it wants me, shamelessly,
a geographic urge that can't be helped,
a crime of nature, both a heretic and ever faithful to its needs.

The book ends with Campo's fluid, admirable translations of Lorca's queer-themed Sonnets ofDark Love. The author also adds a note about Lorca's influence on his own work, explaining that he spent years"trying to make my English sound like Spanish, that elusive inner language ofmy lost childhood in Latin America." Whether he's succeeded in this bit of linguistic cross-pollination is hard to gauge. But in his frequent useof rhyme and his gift for observing his immediate environment, Campo has undoubtedly produced a satisfying, accessible body of work, which haswon him a pair of Lambda Literary Awards and a nomination for the 1999 National BookCritics CircleAward.The poems in Diva, especially the title poem à clef onadolescent clarity and angst, should only extend his considerable audience.--Regina MarlerBook Description
A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo’s Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.
At once relishing and resisting the poetic traditions of formal English verse, Diva showcases Campo moving deftly between received forms and free verse. In each poem the sound of words is transformed into the highest of arts, the act of performance into the exercise of power, and the most profound abjection into the sweet promise of divinity. Culminating with his new and daring translations of Federico García Lorca’s sonetos—the great Spanish poet’s most homoerotically explicit and formally accomplished poems—Campo’s music instills in the reader an exalted understanding of beauty, suffering, and, ultimately, the human capacity for empathy.

From reviews of Campo’s previous poetry:
“Extraordinary meditations on illness and the healing power of words.”—Lambda Literary Foundation

“Read Campo to enter the bloodstream of a man who, with a haunting clarity of vision, shares his memories, his anguish, his healing love.”—Cortney Davis, Literature and Medicine

“Riveting, provocative, and refreshing—[this volume] is a gift to the clinician who is trying to re-invoke in his or her students the humility, compassion, and deep caring that brought us all into medicine in the first place.”—Dr. Sandra L. Bertman, Annals of Internal Medicine

“[Campo] listens to the sounds the body makes, but what he hears is poetry.”—Zoë Ingalls, Chronicle of Higher Education

“Powerful and accessible.”—Jonathan Jackson, Washington Blade

“Bemused, indelible, and heartbreaking.”—Marilyn Hacker, Out

“[Campo’s] private corral of disparate words twist, torque, collide with gorgeous creative imperative.”—Nomi Eve, Independent Weekly
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Customer Reviews (2)

CANDID EROTICISM
In "Diva," Rafael Campo brings to life the issues that color the world today with bold and touching lines of poetry and prose. Campo's palpable language not only invites but envelopes the reader into his worldof pain and anguish, loves and passions-- and the everyday happenstances oflife in America and abroad.A doctor by profession, Campo stitches the rawrealities of the medical world with the ever-impending emotional tuggingthat comes along with the social stigmas associated with incurableillnesses such as AIDS. Campo delicately treads on the balance betweenexperience and observation, leading the reader to a heightened awareness ofthe world around her/him and an empathetic eye to those who share it.

CANDID EROTICISM
In "Diva," Rafael Campo brings to life the issues that color the world today with bold and touching lines of poetry and prose. Campo's palpable language not only invites but envelopes the reader into his worldof pain and anguish, loves and passions-- and the everyday happenstances oflife in America and abroad.A doctor by profession, Campo stitches the rawrealities of the medical world with the ever-impending emotional tuggingthat comes along with the social stigmas associated with incurableillnesses such as AIDS. Campo delicately treads on the balance betweenexperience and observation, leading the reader to a heightened awareness ofthe world around her/him and an empathetic eye to those who share it. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Rafael Campo is acclaimed as an important contemporary poet on the basis of his two books of poetry The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told. In The Poetry of Healing Campo uses his gift for language to explicate and delineate the connections between being a doctor and a poet, a writer and a healer, a gay man and an educator. Campo's topic is always the body and he understands its fragility and resistance, its power and its grace. Campo's prose is precise and poetic; his insights are revelations. The Poetry of Healing is a work of literary grace and compassion--a memoir that illuminates the world with new light and urgency. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This GLM walks on water!
Campo has created a poetic autobiography which describes his life as a gay, Latino doctor and poet. This book exemplifies that a person can be proud of being both a person of color and gay. In addition, we can be artists, healers, and so much more. Though not as effective as Gloria Anzaldua's work, Campo still demonstrates the wonders of inhabiting multiple identities and spaces. At times, he leaves his class-privilege unexamined. Some portions are repetitive. Nevertheless, I feel fortunate that I found and read this series of essays.Knowing that a gay man of color can strive in a demanding field despite bigotry, can perform well at prestigious universities, and can have a long-term partner is quite inspirational for me.

Poetry:the miracle cure
I read Campo's poetry before I knew he was a doctor; therefore, I hope heforgives me for thinking of him as a poet first, a doctor second.But thiseloquent book--and indeed, Campo's life--exemplifies the benefits ofaccessing both sides of one's brain, the creative as well as theanalytical/scientific.At times soaring with hopefulness and at othersquestioning the purpose of life and pondering the darkest moments ofdespair, Campo writes passionately and intimately about his role in thehealing arts.This calling is informed as much by his poetic genius andability to come face to face with raw emotion, unflinchingly, as it is byhis doctoral training.

Campo writes powerfully about AIDS and ourrelationship to the plague in a way one seldom reads:with practicalguidelines, not moralistic platitudes and empty slogans.His essay"Imagining Unmanaging Health Care" is worth the price of thebook.

An excellent volume of essays, full of warmth, compassion, and mostof all, humanity.Campo has truly become the "warrior-physician"he aspired to be--let's hope managed care doesn't drive him from theprofession.

A sensitive book by a gay, Latino, physician who treats AIDS
Dr. Campo provides a sensitive and sometimes provocative look at the life of a gay, minority, physician who treats patients suffering from the plague of the 90s, AIDS.Moreover, Dr. Campo, a true humanist and poet, discusseshow his passion for medicine and writing have oftentimes seemed at oddswith each other. He was able to deal with many, many issues in his life andto use both medicine and writing to heal himself, his patients, and, Ibelieve, some of his readers.He is courageous, too, just by writing thiskind of book. I couldn't have imagined a Yale-educated physician acting so"un-Ivy."But, Dr. Campo has spoken out to describe, in vividdetail, his love of medicine and of words and, most importantly, of hispatients.

This book is a wonderful, wonderful read. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 2002. The length of the article is 341 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Undetectable. (Poetry).(Poem)
Author: Rafael Campo
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2002
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 60Issue: 3Page: 477(2)

Article Type: Poem

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Product Description
text in Spanish496 pages ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Best Heloderma Book Written-- A Classic!
Being a lover of reptiles and especially the Herpetology of the desert southwest, I found this book to be an invaluable resource for Heloderma.The book is both technical with many details of behavior, range and feeding, but also can be easily interpreted by the most casual of venomous lizard lover.Every desert dweller MUST own this book!

The best monograph ever written about Heloderma
_The Gila Monster and Its Allies; The Relationship, Habits, and Behavior of the Lizards of the Family Helodermatidae_ is the classic work on the topic. This reprint of the 1956 edition is updated with a new preface. It contains the ecology, Natural History, morphology, and complex behaviors of these unique venomous lizards of America, Mexico, and Central America. Illustrated with B/W photos, graphs, maps, and drawings. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Proceso, published by CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V. on February 14, 1999. The length of the article is 971 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Víctor Manuel Campos se defiende: la Asociación de Futbolistas Profesionales sigue trabajando con los jugadores que le piden ayuda.(México)(TT: Víctor Manuel Campos defends his actions: the Professional Soccer Players Association continues to work in conjunction with those players that need assistance.)(TA: Mexico)(Entrevista)
Author: Rafael Ocampo
Publication: Proceso (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 14, 1999
Publisher: CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V.
Page: 67

Article Type: Entrevista

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on June 10, 1999. The length of the article is 1291 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: José Luis Sánchez Campos: Cárdenas no elegirá al líder del PRD.(miembro del Partido de la Revolución Democrática; Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, alcalde de Ciudad de México; México)(TT: José Luis Sánchez Campos: Cárdenas will not choose the DRP's leader.)(TA: member of the Democratic Revolution Party; Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Mayor of Mexico City; Mexico)
Author: Rafael Aceituno
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: June 10, 1999
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: 45Issue: 2399Page: 18

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on June 3, 1999. The length of the article is 1331 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Año 2000: dominar el Congreso.(Jesús Martín del Campo, políticio; México)(TT: Year two thousand: controlling Congress.)(TA: Jesús Martín del Campo, politician; Mexico)(Entrevista)
Author: Rafael Aceituno
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: June 3, 1999
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: 45Issue: 2398Page: 16

Article Type: Entrevista

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Book Description
The collection is Liz Hutner's powerful testament to her son, Sam, bravely battling leukemia. The quietly eloquent photographs by Hutner's brother and Sam's uncle, Simeon Hutner, beautifully enhance this portrait of intimacy and courage. The poems do not shy from the gritty details of the medical ordeal the mother faces with her son. But there are many glimpses of joy, too, often found in the ordinary moment of childhood, so few of which Sam is permitted to know. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A little boy's life, death, and remembrance
Superbly enhanced with photography by Simeon Hutner, Life With Sam is the free-verse poetic celebration by Elizabeth Hall Hutner of a little boy's life, death, and remembrance. This blending of heartfulet verses and memorable photographs embrace the life and joy one so young brought to the life of his mother, during his all too brief brief stay with her. Today, I Went Right To His Grave. / I Put Down The Flowers, And Looked / At The Boxwoods Sam's Stepfather / Has Planted On Each Side Of The Stone. / I Held The New Baby In My Arms, / And I Cried As I Read Sam's Name.

An astonishing work of art
This slim volume packs more emotional punch than any ten books, art films, love songs, etc., that you will come across this year.Exploring the hope that waits behind loss, and the heartbreak that waits behind hope, this book will, quite simply, floor you once you read it.All three participants are people of immense courage -- photographer Simeon Hutner, for being able to stand behind the camera and capture the struggle of his family, his sister Elizabeth, whose poems eloquently describe not only the big-picture emotions of those faced with the unfairness of tragedy, but also the little details that make it that much more tragic, and finally her son, Sam, whose trusting, accepting, haunting gaze penetrates past the pages directly into our souls.It's an astonishing work of art, which moved me like few works have before. I highly recommend it to any and all... but you really have to be prepared for an emotional jolt when you pick this book up.

an essential book
An abiding partnership that arises from losses endured by a sister and brother shadows the edge of each page in this amazing little book of words and images where death is not only rendered with a bright, unflinching eye but questioned, pondered, and wrestled with by siblings who through their love for a child, for art, and for each other refused to be silenced by the great wall of suffering they each faced alone.An essential book for anyone involved with the sorrows of cancer, but more importantly, anyone willing to look at what real courage demands. ... Read more