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.
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- I. The Enemy
- Dialogue with Sun and Poet
- Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002)
- ‘‘Elsa,Varadero, 1934’’
- Night Has Fallen
- Personal Mythology
- Piranhas
- Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics
- El Viejo y la Mar
- Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in thePhotograph of Us on My Desk
- The Enemy
- God, Gays, and Guns
- Patriotic Poem
- Post–9/11 Parable
- Sestina Dolorosa
- What Passes Now for Moral Discourse
- From Libro de Preguntas
- II. Eighteen Days in France
- III. Toward a Theory of Memory
- from Cien Sonetos de Amor
- A Simple Cuban Meal
- The Sailfish
- Ganymede, to Zeus
- After the Long Drive
- For Jorge, after Twenty Years
- Song in the Off-Season
- Catastrophic Sestina
- Toward a Theory of Memory
- Patagonia
- Defense of Marriage
- The Story of Us
- The Sodomite’s Lament
- Equinoctial Downpour
- Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up
- The Changing of the Seasons
- Once, It Seemed Better
- October, Last Sail
- IV. Dawn, New Age
- Dawn, New Age
- Allegorical
- Progress
- The Crocuses
- Crybaby Haiku
- ‘‘silence = death’’
- Clinical Vignettes
- You Bring Out the Doctor in Me
- Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton
- Tuesday Morning
- Arriving
- Absolution
- On Doctoring
- Sick Day
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