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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Illness as Muse
- From The Other Man Was Me
- El Curandero
- from Song for My Lover
- Aida
- The Test
- Allegory
- Age 5 Born with AIDS
- Technology and Medicine
- The Distant Moon
- Finally
- From What the Body Told
- Route 17
- Prescription
- The Good Doctor
- Ten Patients, and Another
- Lost in the Hospital
- My Voice
- El Día de los Muertos
- What the Body Told
- From Diva
- The Pelvic Exam
- The Gift of AIDS
- The Abdominal Exam
- from The Changing Face of AIDS
- A Death Perplexing
- My Reasoning
- Recognition
- The Mental Status Exam
- Last Rites
- From Landscape with Human Figure
- The Couple
- On Christmas Eve
- The Four Humours
- from Afraid of the Dark
- What I Would Give
- From The Enemy
- from Eighteen Days in France
- You Bring Out the Doctor in Me
- Tuesday Morning
- Arriving
- Absolution
- On Doctoring
- Sick Day
- From Alternative Medicine
- Calendar
- The Common Mental Health Disorders of Immigrants
- Heart Grow Fonder
- The Reading
- Health
- Hospital Song
- Faith Healing
- Iatrogenic
- The Third Step in Obtaining an Arterial Blood Gas
- For All the Freaks of the World
- Recent Past Events
- Band of Gold
- Primary Care
- Nude
- Not Untrue
- On the Wards
- Alternative Medicine
- Without My White Coat
- The Performance
- What the Dead See
- New Poems
- Incidental Finding
- As We Die
- Hospital Writing Workshop
- “Doctors Lie, May Hide Mistakes"
- Comfort Measures Only
- The Chart
- Eden
- Complaint
- Morbidity and Mortality Rounds
- Diagnosis Code
- Ancient Mythologies of Healing
- Treponema Pallidum
- Just Know Your Shit
- Hippocratic Oath 2.0
- On the Beauty of Science
- Poem for Ebola
- Invaders
- Metastatic Colon Cancer
- Cardiology
- I Imagine Again I Don’t Let You Die
- Swim for Life
- Your Poems Are Never Joyful
- Addiction
- Post-Emergency
- Lessons Not Learned during Medical Training
- Quatrains from the Clinic
- End of Life Discussion
- The Pond
- Hospice Rounds
- Ghazal: By the Sea
- The Stethoscope Replies
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