What the Body Told Book

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.Read More