Landscape with Human Figure

Rafael Campo

Jan 2002 · Duke University Press

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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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Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. His debut collection of poetry, The Other Man Was Me, won the 1993 National Poetry Series award. His second collection, What the Body Told, won a Lambda Literary Award; his third, Diva, was a finalist in 2000 for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize (both titles also available from Duke University Press). His work has been published in DoubleTake, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Out, The Progressive, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post Book World. He is also the author of a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.