Comfort Measures Only by Rafael Campo

ABOUT THE BOOK

REVIEWS

Campo’s poems provide a master-class in writing that combines the best of prosody with the profoundest of human feeling. Rafael Campo is a much-published, award-winning poet and a physician

- By Norbert Hirschhorn on London Grip, the international online cultural magazine.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

The poems in this collection are chosen from the following books to the publishers of which we are very grateful: The Other Man Was Me (Arte Piublico Press, 1994); What the Body Told (Duke University Press, 1997); Diva (Duke University Press, 2000); Landscape with Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002); The Enemy (Duke University Press, 2007); and Alternative Medicine (Duke University Press, 2013).

We are also grateful to the editors of the following periodicals, in which many of these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different forms: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Boston Review, Antioch Review, Cure, Gay and Lesbian Review – Worldwide, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Harvard Medicine, The Hudson Review, Journal of Medical Humanities, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, Slate.com, Southwest Review, Sugar House Review, Threepenny Review, upstreet, Warwick Review, Yale Review and Zyzzyva.

'Recent Past Events’ was commended in the 2012 Hippocrates Prize (open category) and ‘Morbidity Mortality Rounds’ won the 2013 Hippocrates Open International First Prize.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

"valuable and moving …he is undaunted by the ugliness of the physical deterioration apparent before his eyes, seeking always to capture the beauty of the human soul in struggle with reality”
New York Times Book Review

“Rafael Campo is inevitably a poet of heartbreak, yet he remains a poet of accompanying hope”
The Hudson Review

“one of the most significant poets writing in America today”
Alicia Ostriker

Rafael Campo is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of eight highly acclaimed books and the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry; his third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his fourth, Landscape with Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002), won the Gold Medal from ForeWord for the best book of poetry published by an independent press. 

His work has also been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in numerous prominent periodicals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, Salon.com, Slate.com, Threepenny Review, Washington Post Book World, Yale Review, and elsewhere; he has also been featured on National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Arts website. He has lectured widely, with recent appearances at such venues as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, and the 92nd Street Y in New York. His fifth book of poetry, The Enemy, was awarded the Sheila Motton Book Prize for the best collection of poetry published in 2007 by the New England Poetry Club, the nation’s oldest poetry organization. 

In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine; he has also won the 2013 Hippocrates Open International Prize, one of the highest value awards for a single poem in the world, for original verse that addresses a medical theme. His newest collection of poems, Alternative Medicine, was the subject of feature stories on PBS NewsHour and the CBC’s Sunday Edition radio show. See more information at www.rafaelcampo.com.