“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
“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 bespeaks compassion, dedication, and the sort of intellectual curiosity you’d expect from an M.D. with a creative writing degree.”
- Eric McHenry (New York Times Book Review) “[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) “[A] powerful collection. . . .”
- Gregg Shapiro (Windy City Times) “[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) “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) “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 (Front Page) "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."
"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)
