Landscape with Human Figure - Tapa blanda

"While the settings in this collection vary widely - a blacked-out Cuba; a bridge in Florence; a Fayetteville back road - it was the moments in which Campo focuses on the human figures populating these landscapes that resonated the most with me. . . . Moments like these, in which Campo captures some of the nuances of healing, are woven throughout the collection, and remind us that sometimes creating emotional distance - even in writing poetry - is the only way to steel against pain." -- Ricardo Hernandez * Los Angeles Review of Books * "Campo is too modest to portray himself as hero, but we sense the heroic in him . . . . [P]art of Campo's courage is his willingness to confront his own dark fears . . . . Dr. Rafael Campo is inevitably a poet of heartbreak; yet he remains a poet of accompanying hope." -- Sydney Lea * The Hudson Review * "Rafael Campo blends several selves into his persona as a poet-Cuban-American, openly gay man, physician, AIDS healer, teacher. Each facet of his life is brilliantly yet formally depicted in his fourth collection, Landscape with Human Figure . . . . Each rereading will yield new wisdom, heart, and insight-great poems, really, reveal their truths with inspired reluctance. Campo is among his generation's best poets . . . ." -- Richard Labonte * The Front Page * "Campo confirms his celebrated ability to move from formal verses to far-reaching reflections on alienation and the manifestation of internal energies on external surfaces. With emotion and a technical prowess surgical in its delicacy, the book exposes our raw selves and our travels between beauty and terror." -- Rachel DeWoskin * Boston Magazine * "[A]mbitious, elegant poems. . . . [I]n Landscape with Human Figure, Campo's clear gaze, generous heart and great skill combine to create a resonant and often romantic collection of poems, one that locates and celebrates all our shared `outsider' hearts." -- Kevin Riordan * Philadelphia Gay News * "[A] powerful collection. . . ." -- Gregg Shapiro * Windy City Times * "[A] pleasant and accessible fourth collection of poetry . . . . [T]he gentle, regular rhythms of [Campo's] poems give them a sense of quiet control. . . . Contemplative, hopeful, and heartfelt. . . ." -- Chelsey Johnson * Out * "Landscape with Human Figure bespeaks compassion, dedication, and the sort of intellectual curiosity you'd expect from an M.D. with a creative writing degree." -- Eric McHenry * The New York Times Book Review * "Rafael Campo is an accomplished formalist. I hugely enjoy watching him skitter from sestina to pantoum, sonnet to rhymed couplets, to say nothing of his own nonce forms devised as the situation suggests."-Maxine Kumin "Landscape with Human Figure is a striking achievement. I am moved, as his readers are sure to be, by Campo's wisdom, maturity, depth, heart, and range of experience."-Grace Schulman

In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America's most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo's poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together-just as did the incantations of humankind's earliest healers-into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.