About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi
I. The Enemy
Dialogue with Sun and Poet 3
Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002) 4
"Elsa, Varadero, 1934" 5
Night Has Fallen 6
Personal Mythology 7
Piranhas 8
Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics 10
El Viejo y la Mar 12
Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk 13
The Enemy 14
God, Gays, and Guns 15
Patriotic Poem 17
Post-9/11 Parable 18
Sestina Dolorosa 19
What Passes Now for Moral Discourse 21
from Libro de Preguntas 22
II. Eighteen Days in France
Eighteen Days in France 27
III. Toward a Theory of Memory
from Cien Sonetos de Amor 47
A Simple Cuban Meal 51
The Sailfish 52
Ganymede, to Zeus 53
After the Long Drive
55
For Jorge, after Twenty Years 57
Song in the Off-Season 60
Catastrophic Sestina 61
Toward a Theory of Memory 63
Patagonia 67
Defense of Marriage 68
The Story of Us 69
The Sodomite's Lament 71
Equinoctial Downpour 72
Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up 73
The Changing of the Seasons 74
Once, It Seemed Better 75
October, Last Sail 76
IV. Dawn, New Age
Dawn, New Age 79
Allegorical 80
Progress 81
The Crocuses 82
Crybaby Haiku 83
"Silence=Death" 87
Clinical Vignettes 88
You Bring Out the Doctor in Me 90
Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton 92
Tuesday Morning 93
Arriving 95
Absolution 97
On Doctoring 98
Sick Day 99
About the Author :
Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Landscape with Human Figure, winner of the gold medal in poetry from ForeWord Magazine; Diva, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; all also published by Duke University Press. He has written two books of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for memoir. His poetry and essays have appeared in periodicals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Out, The Paris Review, and The Washington Post Book World.
Review :
"Rafael Campo is one of the most significant poets writing in America today. In exploring the complexities of his position--Cuban-American, gay, Harvard grad, physician, scrupulous observer of himself, of others, and of the worlds we inhabit--he has produced a richly textured, layered body of work, distinguished for its mastery of, and wrestling with, poetic form, as well as for its courage, compassion, and clarity. Hybrid--a mix of memory and desire, trust and fear, anger and love--he has always been death-haunted yet he speaks for what is alive and healing in American culture." Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of No Heaven "Rafael Campo writes tough, questioning, rueful, exquisite, true-hearted poems that resist nostalgia while testing the transformative power of beauty. In perfectly wrought poem after poem, he explores the 'honor' of sacrifice and the breadth of human fidelities. The Enemy is surely Campo's best book yet."--Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University "Rafael Campo's The Enemy moves with naturalness, speed, and balance between experiences of domestic love--a couple of gay men, celebrating rites of daily ordinariness--and scenes from a doctor's life. We turn to Campo for frankness, freshness, and the tang of truth, and we are rewarded."--Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems
