Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2016 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478000211)

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.

Author: Rafael Campo
ISBN-10: 147800021X
ISBN-13: 9781478000211
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2018
Pages: 184
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.50w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 09/01/2018 pg. 29