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.”

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Medical

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1996

About the author

Dr. Rafael Campo, MD (Harvard Medical School, 1992; M.A., English, Amherst College; B.S., neuroscience, Amherst College), is a poet and doctor of internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University's Creative Writing MFA Program.

His first collection of poems, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, won the National Poetry Series Open Competition in 1993. What the Body Told (1996) won a Lambda Literary Award, and Diva was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. The Poetry of Healing (1996) also received a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir.

Campo is a PEN Center West Literary Award finalist and a recipient of the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences Annual Achievement Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Echoing Green Foundation. He frequently lectures widely and gives seminars and workshops relating to medicine, literary writing, and culture.

Reviews

[Conner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems in this collection can be divided into two categories. The first, recalling Beat Poetry but composed to a careful meter, weave issues of LGBT identity and explicit depictions of sex in post-AIDS America with an almost religious concern for finding in these experiences spirituality and invincibility. I felt that the author's voice was drowned in the echo of the poets preceeding him. It seems impossible not to compare these poems to Ginsberg's, and while technically strong, they lack both the surprising word-choice and manic fervor that gave Ginsberg's poetry its frequently prophetic feel.

I found the second category of poems far more compelling. Campo is a practicing physician, and this experience is brought to the forefront as he reminisces about injured or dying patients that he has attended to. While I don't know if the strongest section of the collection, Ten Patients, and Another, is strictly autobiographical, it is completely convincing. These are written in a less elegant style, but I found that this adds to the grave authorial tone accompanying this segment and lends the descriptions confidence and power as we spectate over the sickbeds of these forsaken people.

[jojo Lazar]

ten patients and another...oh my god. the merging of medical history and sonnet?! another high school syllabus turned actual real-life-friend & mentor. love it. the aforementioned 'ten patients' section reads like hypnotic addictive tormenting and gruesome and lovely poetry versions of House!!! sorry, i don't use tv comparisons lightly...

[Emmett Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Campo takes a while to love and understand; I would sit with one poem for an hour and it still wouldn't have sunk in. The thing is, it isn't frustrating. It's illuminating and gorgeous, and stronger than vodka. An incredible poet.

[Brittany Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good poetry

[Leah Engle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely breathtaking. Campo's poetry is a handful, but well worth the read. My absolute favorite poem is "For You All Beauty", it brings me to tears.

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

His series of sonnets give a viewpoint into the lives of the dying and the dead. A wonderful collection of poems written at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

[Scott Biggerstaff · Rating 5 out of 5]

So hard to capture what it's like to be a physician without being overly sentimental or cynical - Campo achieves it while paying attention to the craft.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Ten Patients, and Another
By Rafael Campo

[Duke Press]

“Now a gay physician has added his story to the narrative of medicine: Rafael Campo’s work queers medicine, violates all boundaries, and opens up the physician and his audience to medicine’s possibilities, its shortcomings, and its poetry.”--Chris Freeman, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review

[Dedrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed some of the poetry in this book, but I didn't read it all.