“Rafael Campo is one of the most significant poets writing in America today. In exploring the complexities of his position-Cuban American, gay, Harvard grad, physician, scrupulous observer of himself, of others, and of the worlds we inhabit-he has produced a richly textured, layered body of work, distinguished for its mastery of, and wrestling with, poetic form, as well as for its courage, compassion, and clarity. Hybrid-a mix of memory and desire, trust and fear, anger and love-his work has always been death-haunted yet he speaks for what is alive and healing in American culture.”-Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of No Heaven
“Rafael Campo writes tough, questioning, rueful, exquisite, true-hearted poems that resist nostalgia while testing the transformative power of beauty. In perfectly wrought poem after poem, he explores the ‘honor’ of sacrifice and the breadth of human fidelities. The Enemy is surely Campo’s best book yet.”-Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University
“Rafael Campo’s The Enemy moves with naturalness, speed, and balance between experiences of domestic love-a couple of gay men, celebrating rites of daily ordinariness-and scenes from a doctor’s life. We turn to Campo for frankness, freshness, and the tang of truth, and we are rewarded.”-Rosanna Warren, author of Departure
“[A]n enterprising, emotive journey visiting upon many wide-ranging, contemporary themes. . . . Campo's talent is on great display here, soft, smooth, flowing, and soothing enough to pamper even the most hardened of hearts.”
- Jim Piechota (Bay Area Reporter) “Campo's poems are always a surprise, shockingly honest and revelatory, words that are shaped and made rhythmic by form--bullets, if you will, explosives that arrive shiny and contained. In this collection, his poems reach new heights of maturity and insight, and they are, more than ever, searingly honest.”
- Cortney Davis (Literature, Arts and Medicine Database) “For readers who are new to Campo's poetry, this collection is a good introduction. He writes of music and celebrates the erotic. He has awe for the mysterious and a familiarity with despair, and he catches frequent hints of God's presence. In this book, there are tiresome days in the clinic and patients who are near death but who will not die. There are poems in which our fragments all fall into place perfectly. . . . Campo's poems show how medicine can best be of service in the absence of cures or quick fixes, and how medical professionals can best be present, mindfully and emotionally, during moments of human suffering.”
- Heather A. Burns (New England Journal of Medicine) “My favorite book of 2007, the one I keep returning to again and again, is Rafael Campo’s The Enemy. Campo, the pinpoint lyricist, takes an unflinching look at the deceptions necessary for war, the weaknesses it reveals and disguises as glory. Battles within the body, clashes of landscape and culture, wars of mindset and madness-Campo unleashes truths within stanzas that are deftly and uncompromisingly structured. His revelations-ragged, miraculous, hard-won-spark the ache of recognition (’We have become the creature no deity would deign to call ‘child’’), but also turn the heart towards hope.”
- Patricia Smith (Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation)
