ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Landscape with Human Figure, winner of the gold medal in poetry from ForeWord Magazine; Diva, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; all also published by Duke University Press. He has written two books of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for memoir. His poetry and essays have appeared in periodicals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Out, The Paris Review, and The Washington Post Book World.

REVIEWS

“Rafael Campo is one of the most significant poets writing in America today. In exploring the complexities of his position—Cuban American, gay, Harvard grad, physician, scrupulous observer of himself, of others, and of the worlds we inhabit—he has produced a richly textured, layered body of work, distinguished for its mastery of, and wrestling with, poetic form, as well as for its courage, compassion, and clarity. Hybrid—a mix of memory and desire, trust and fear, anger and love—his work has always been death-haunted yet he speaks for what is alive and healing in American culture.”—Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of No Heaven

“Rafael Campo writes tough, questioning, rueful, exquisite, true-hearted poems that resist nostalgia while testing the transformative power of beauty. In perfectly wrought poem after poem, he explores the ‘honor’ of sacrifice and the breadth of human fidelities. The Enemy is surely Campo’s best book yet.”—Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University

“Rafael Campo’s The Enemy moves with naturalness, speed, and balance between experiences of domestic love—a couple of gay men, celebrating rites of daily ordinariness—and scenes from a doctor’s life. We turn to Campo for frankness, freshness, and the tang of truth, and we are rewarded.”—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure

“[A]n enterprising, emotive journey visiting upon many wide-ranging, contemporary themes. . . . Campo's talent is on great display here, soft, smooth, flowing, and soothing enough to pamper even the most hardened of hearts.”

-- Jim Piechota Bay Area Reporter

“Campo's poems are always a surprise, shockingly honest and revelatory, words that are shaped and made rhythmic by form--bullets, if you will, explosives that arrive shiny and contained. In this collection, his poems reach new heights of maturity and insight, and they are, more than ever, searingly honest.”

-- Cortney Davis Literature, Arts and Medicine Database

“For readers who are new to Campo's poetry, this collection is a good introduction. He writes of music and celebrates the erotic. He has awe for the mysterious and a familiarity with despair, and he catches frequent hints of God's presence. In this book, there are tiresome days in the clinic and patients who are near death but who will not die. There are poems in which our fragments all fall into place perfectly. . . . Campo's poems show how medicine can best be of service in the absence of cures or quick fixes, and how medical professionals can best be present, mindfully and emotionally, during moments of human suffering.”

-- Heather A. Burns New England Journal of Medicine

“My favorite book of 2007, the one I keep returning to again and again, is Rafael Campo’s The Enemy. Campo, the pinpoint lyricist, takes an unflinching look at the deceptions necessary for war, the weaknesses it reveals and disguises as glory. Battles within the body, clashes of landscape and culture, wars of mindset and madness—Campo unleashes truths within stanzas that are deftly and uncompromisingly structured. His revelations—ragged, miraculous, hard-won—spark the ache of recognition (’We have become the creature no deity would deign to call ‘child’’), but also turn the heart towards hope.”

-- Patricia Smith Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

El Viejo y la Mar

Libro de Preguntas

Cien Sonetos de Amor

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