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travisclau's review against another edition
5.0
A fantastic retrospective of Campo's work with previously unpublished poems -- timely, moving, and the kind of poetic work that can bridge medicine and the humanities.
cosmological's review
emotional
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
5.0
“None of us lives forever. Many of us might have our lives prolonged by biomedical interventions whose financial costs are exorbitant; too infrequently do we question the toll they also exact on our humanity. The fantasies about what causes illness that Sontag railed against (cancer results from repressed anger; AIDS is a punishment from G-d) have been replaced by even more deluded fantasies that science somehow can prevent death. The only way we can defy our own mortality is through acts of the imagination, by creating the stories and sculptures and paintings and poems that will outlast us, but that will always be animated by our will to have created them.”
(Intro. to Comfort Measures Only)
—
This poetry collection brought me to tears with nearly every single poem—Will sent me this copy for the holidays, annotated by him (which only made reading it that much more special, since Campo’s style and perspective so often reminded me of you, Will, a scientist with the mind of an artist), and he noted how every single final line Campo writes is just. Killer. And it’s so emphatically true. There were poems I wasn’t as attached to as others, and still, when that ending came around, it hit me like a freight truck. Maybe I’m just very emotional! I don’t know. I think that’s how he would want it to be read, anyway.
It’s a really special collection. I’m going to be thinking about it for a while: the intersection between the way a doctor loves a patient and the way a person who happens to be a doctor loves his lover. The blurring of the lines between those two, the blurring of the lines between the doctor and the patient—but also the clear divide. The doctor cannot understand how the patient feels, not really, but Campo immortalizes his interpretations of those experiences and emotions in these carefully constructed pages. He is unable to remove himself from the narrative—in the introduction, he acknowledges this, saying “. . . To write about another’s suffering can seem entirely presumptuous, as if it were somehow possible to recreate on the expanse of the clean, neat white page the image an anorexic teenager sees of herself in her bathroom mirror that leads her to induce vomiting—or worse, that somehow, in the earnest imaginative quest for that universal balm that heals, anorexia becomes indistinguishable from anemia; AIDS and ALS and AML, interchangeable.”
It strikes me, because this notion is evident throughout—the illnesses Campo discusses in his poems are all different, and represented differently, and they’re heartbreakingly specific, as are the scenarios! And, yet, he somehow manages to convey this underlying connection between them all: at the end of the day, the language a doctor speaks to a body he desires to understand—and, when possible, heal, cure—IS universal. Regardless of the illness, it’s the same drive. And yet it’s all so different. It’s a tricky line to walk, and Rafael Campo’s words do so beautifully, holding himself accountable for his romanticization, as well as for a lack thereof. It’s as much coping as it is a duty. Honor our dead, honor our living, honor those that live in the precarious balance of watching one shift to the other, when there is no more that the stethoscope and prescriptions and operations and diagnoses can do. It blew me away.
(Intro. to Comfort Measures Only)
—
This poetry collection brought me to tears with nearly every single poem—Will sent me this copy for the holidays, annotated by him (which only made reading it that much more special, since Campo’s style and perspective so often reminded me of you, Will, a scientist with the mind of an artist), and he noted how every single final line Campo writes is just. Killer. And it’s so emphatically true. There were poems I wasn’t as attached to as others, and still, when that ending came around, it hit me like a freight truck. Maybe I’m just very emotional! I don’t know. I think that’s how he would want it to be read, anyway.
It’s a really special collection. I’m going to be thinking about it for a while: the intersection between the way a doctor loves a patient and the way a person who happens to be a doctor loves his lover. The blurring of the lines between those two, the blurring of the lines between the doctor and the patient—but also the clear divide. The doctor cannot understand how the patient feels, not really, but Campo immortalizes his interpretations of those experiences and emotions in these carefully constructed pages. He is unable to remove himself from the narrative—in the introduction, he acknowledges this, saying “. . . To write about another’s suffering can seem entirely presumptuous, as if it were somehow possible to recreate on the expanse of the clean, neat white page the image an anorexic teenager sees of herself in her bathroom mirror that leads her to induce vomiting—or worse, that somehow, in the earnest imaginative quest for that universal balm that heals, anorexia becomes indistinguishable from anemia; AIDS and ALS and AML, interchangeable.”
It strikes me, because this notion is evident throughout—the illnesses Campo discusses in his poems are all different, and represented differently, and they’re heartbreakingly specific, as are the scenarios! And, yet, he somehow manages to convey this underlying connection between them all: at the end of the day, the language a doctor speaks to a body he desires to understand—and, when possible, heal, cure—IS universal. Regardless of the illness, it’s the same drive. And yet it’s all so different. It’s a tricky line to walk, and Rafael Campo’s words do so beautifully, holding himself accountable for his romanticization, as well as for a lack thereof. It’s as much coping as it is a duty. Honor our dead, honor our living, honor those that live in the precarious balance of watching one shift to the other, when there is no more that the stethoscope and prescriptions and operations and diagnoses can do. It blew me away.
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