Rafael Campo : What the Body Told

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.”

Amazon.com Review
Rafael Campo skillfully plays the rules of formal poetry against themselves in his second book of poetry, the Lambda Award-winning What the Body Told. In these intense poems, the body tells its story of loneliness and perseverance in an unwavering voice. One might expect the confessional poetry of a gay Cuban American poet to strike out in an expansive, perhaps enthusiastic mode, but Campo discovers in the sonnet plenty of room to explore questions of sexual, cultural, and professional identity. Five sonnet sequences--"Canciones de la Vida," "Canciones de la Muerte," and "Ten Patients, and Another"--form the heart of the book. These recall and try to answer each other's agonizing investigations into AIDS, desire, and the ironic distance between doctor and patient. Although the speaker is generally involved in the dramatic situation, he tends to speak as an observer, limning the assumptions below the surface and exploding them with fury. In other parts of the book, Campo synthesizes two traditions of formal poetry--the elegiac and the erotic--to create a third in such poems as "Before Safe Sex," "The 10,000th AIDS Death in San Francisco," and "Men Get the Shaft." These moving and vivid poems allow the reader to grieve for AIDS victims while simultaneously considering what it means to be healed. Despite Campo's day job--Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School--he refuses in his poems to play the healer; his evocative diagnoses, however, prescribe a schedule of gentleness, understanding, and rigor to make it through this life.