Graceful, insightful, often disturbing essays on the healing art by
a doctor-poet who daringly reveals his own human vulnerabilities
and longings. "As a poet, my challenge is to create myself, in my
own image, using the corporeal materials common to all speakers of
English; as a physician, my challenge is to accept the absolute
necessity of that process," writes Campo, who currently practices
medicine at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Hospital. He
writes poignantly of his boyhood as the dark-skinned child of Cuban
emigres in affluent white suburbia, of how the cracks about
"faggots" by his jock roommates at Amherst steeled him to the
possibility of his own homosexuality, of meeting in college the man
who remains his life's companion. He tells us briefly of his
medical education at Harvard and, with deep feeling, of his
residency at the University of California in San Francisco, chosen
in part for its rich mix of Asians, whites, Latinos, and openly gay
and lesbian people. There, immersed in the care of AIDS patients,
he contemplated conducting a poetry-writing workshop on the ward,
until realizing that it was his patients all along who had been
teaching him to write. They also taught him about living and dying,
healing and loving. The author of two books of poetry (The Other
Man Was Me and What the Body Told), Campo has been teased by his
colleagues for believing in the curative power of words. His joking
response is that he's never seen a poem cause liver failure or
bone-marrow toxicity, but his serious one is that poetry is "the
clearest drug of all, the essence and distillation of the process
of living itself." Today Campo's patients are the mostly Latino
poor of Boston; the rest of us must settle for his fine, perceptive
writing. (Kirkus Reviews)
This work aims to bridge the clinical distance of medicine to face
the pain of mortality, the brokenness of society and the
vulnerability of human beings.
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