What the Body Told - Softcover

Campo, Rafael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822317427 ISBN 13: 9780822317425

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 1996

Synopsis

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.”

About this title

About the Author

Rafael Campo is Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Author of The Other Man Was Me, he is a PEN Center West and Lambda Literary Award finalist. His poems have appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry/1995.

From the Back Cover

"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

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822317427
• ISBN 13: 9780822317425
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136