Background
Rafael Campo was born in Dover, New Jersey, on November 24, 1964.
Amherst, Massachusetts 01002, USA
In 1987, Rafael Campo received a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College and a Master of Arts in 1991.
25 Shattuck St, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Rafael Campo received a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1992.
(The Other Man Was Me is the long-awaited poetic debut fro...)
The Other Man Was Me is the long-awaited poetic debut from the winner of the National Poetry series 1993 Open Competition. It is a voyage of many discoveries: a people loses its homeland and finds a vast new continent, an immigrant’s son discovers his cultural and sexual identities, and a physician awakens to the suffering of his patients. This collection of poems begins by chronicling the long journey from Spain to Cuba and ultimately to America that has been undertaken by so many hopeful, proud people.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XBSD8XC/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafa...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822317338/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(The author reveals his spiritual and psychological develo...)
The author reveals his spiritual and psychological development as a doctor, discussing his passions and fears as well as his life as a doctor, poet, Hispanic American, and gay man.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393040097/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed you...)
A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo’s Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822323834/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compe...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0082GR14M/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(A doctor and celebrated poet connects the two sides of hi...)
A doctor and celebrated poet connects the two sides of his life in a strirring collection of verse, revealing the healing power of poetry as it reflects on human illness, recuperation, mortality, and beyond.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393057275/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(In his fifth collection of poetry, the physician and awar...)
In his fifth collection of poetry, the physician and award-winning writer Rafael Campo considers what it means to be the enemy in America today. Using the empathetic medium of a poetry grounded in the sentient physical body we all share, he writes of a country endlessly at war - not only against the presumed enemy abroad but also with its own troubled conscience. Yet whether he is addressing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the battle against the AIDS pandemic, or the culture wars surrounding the issues of feminism and gay marriage, Campo’s compelling poems affirm the notion that hope arises from even the most bitter of conflicts. That hope - manifest here in the Cuban exile’s dream of returning to his homeland, in a dying IV drug user’s wish for humane medical treatment, in a downcast housewife’s desire to express herself meaningfully through art - is that somehow we can be better than ourselves. Through a kaleidoscopic lens of poetic forms, Campo soulfully reveals this greatest of human aspirations as the one sustaining us all.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EHNZE2K/?tag=2022091-20
2007
(In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-ph...)
In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-physician Rafael Campo examines the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. As masterfully crafted as they are viscerally powerful, these poems propose voice itself as a kind of therapeutic medium. For all that most ails us, Alternative Medicine offers the balm of song and the salve of the imagination: from the wounds of our stubborn differences of identity, to the pain of alienation in a world of unfeeling technologies, to the shame of the persistent injustices in our society, Campo's poetry displays a deep understanding of hurt as the possibility for healing. Demonstrating an abiding faith in our survival, this stunning, heartfelt book ultimately embraces the great diversity of our ways of knowing and dreaming, of needing and loving, and of living and dying.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H3CU4O0/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(In Comfort Measures Only, Rafael Campo bears witness to t...)
In Comfort Measures Only, Rafael Campo bears witness to the unspeakable beauty bound up with human suffering. Gathered from his over twenty-year career as a poet-physician, these eighty-nine poems - thirty-one of which have never been previously published in a collection - pull back the curtain in the ER, laying bare our pain and joining us all in spellbinding moments of pathos. The poet, who is also truly a healer, revives language itself - its sounds channeled through our hearts and lungs, its rhythms amplified through the stethoscope - to make meaning of our bewilderment when our bodies so eloquently and yet wordlessly fail us. Campo’s transcendent poems, in all their modernity amidst the bleep of heart monitors and the wail of ambulance sirens, remind us of what the ancients understood: that poetry sustains us, and whether we live or die, through what we can imagine and create in our shared voices we may yet achieve immortality.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GMLG7G4/?tag=2022091-20
2018
educator physician author medician poet
Rafael Campo was born in Dover, New Jersey, on November 24, 1964.
In 1987, Rafael Campo received a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College and a Master of Arts in 1991. He also received a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1992.
Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His primary care practice serves mostly Latinos, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people, and people with HIV infection. In addition to his medical teaching and practice, Campo is also on the faculty of Lesley University's Creative Writing MFA Program, and frequently lectures widely, and gives seminars and workshops relating to medicine, literary writing, and culture.
(A doctor and celebrated poet connects the two sides of hi...)
2003(The author reveals his spiritual and psychological develo...)
1997(What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafa...)
1996(A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed you...)
1999(In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compe...)
2002(In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-ph...)
2013(In his fifth collection of poetry, the physician and awar...)
2007(The Other Man Was Me is the long-awaited poetic debut fro...)
1994(In Comfort Measures Only, Rafael Campo bears witness to t...)
2018Rafael Campo was raised as a Catholic.
Campo’s poems often address questions of illness, health, suffering, and identity. The author of many books of poetry and several collections of prose, Campo’s writing reflects his commitment to poetry as the fullest expression of self, and his understanding of it as a necessary tool for both healing and empathy.
Campo’s own poetry tends to mix narratives of family, history, and illness with an attention to form, especially received forms. His interest in forms, he has alleged, comes from his own “hybrid” experience.
Quotations:
“We come to poetry, I think because we are silenced in many ways. In biomedicine, we’re so good at appropriating the narrative - the biopsy report, the CT count, the potassium level. Writing gives patients an opportunity to say, this is my cancer, this is my HIV. It’s not a generic, what you see on the mammogram or how many lymph nodes are positive - I’m an individual.”
“Being a hybrid myself, I’m very interested in playing with Indonesian forms and Middle Eastern forms, importing some of these things, being in a way almost promiscuous with form.”
Rafael Campo’s life has been filled with seemingly conflicting desires, one being his pursuit of a dual career as a physician and poet; another is his wish to please his parents while still following his homosexual leanings, and yet another is the wish to be accepted by an Anglo-Saxon society while embracing his Latin roots. All of these issues fill Campo’s books of poetry as well as a prose memoir.
When Campo was in medical school at Harvard, he thought perhaps he might be able to change the contradictory parts of himself. He considered abandoning poetry, which he had written since he was a child. He also thought he might be able to purge himself of his homosexuality and ethnicity. Instead, he took a year off to earn an M.A. in creative writing and has since struggled with these personal demons in his poetry.
In interviews Rafael Campo has called himself “a mutt, a mongrel, a kind of happy monster,” referring to the disparate professional and personal identities he has learned to negotiate.
Quotes from others about the person
“Campo's poems are highly structured, usually sonnets in iambic pentameter; he uses the security of form as a position from which to delve deep into the heart of his own feelings - feelings for his AIDS and cancer patients and for emergency room arrivals who have suffered from brutal encounters with an overwhelmingly homophobic and racist American society.” - Frederick Luis Aldama, gay and Lesbian Literature contributor