Fiction, World Literature

What the Body Told

Name: What the Body Told
Author: Rafael Campo
ISBN: 9780822317425

by Rafael Campo

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Overview

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 began 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.

About the Author, Rafael Campo

Rafael Campo is Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Author of The Other Man Was Me, he is a PEN Center West and Lambda Literary Award finalist. His poems have appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry/1995.