What the Body Told by Rafael Campo
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.”“Campo’s background and concerns—he writes out of his identity and experience as a gay Cuban-American physician—make for a rich field of investigations, and his best work is both passionate and formally accomplished. What the Body Told dives into the difficult, necessary territory of physical love, desire, contagion, illness; such poems are essential to our moment. We need them.”—Mark Doty
“Rafael Campo is one of the most gifted and accomplished younger poets writing in English. More than that, he is a writer engaged in several of the pivotal struggles/issues of our era, and what he has to say about them is ‘news that stays news.’”—Marilyn Hacker
Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Campo is the author of The Enemy, Landscape with Human Figure, Diva, and What the Body Told, all published by Duke University Press. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Gold Medal in Poetry from ForeWord, the Paterson Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Campo's poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Progressive, Slate.com, Yale Review, and The Threepenny Review.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822317425 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822317427 |
| Title | What the Body Told |
| Author | Rafael Campo |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Duke University Press Books |
| Year published | 1996-02-21 |
| Number of pages | 136 |
| Prizes | Winner of Lambda Literary Awards (Gay Poetry) 1996 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |