Comfort Measures Only

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 poemsthirty-one of which have never been previously published in a collectionpull 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 itselfits sounds channeled through our hearts and lungs, its rhythms amplified through the stethoscopeto make meaning of our bewilderment when our bodies so eloquently and yet wordlessly fail us. Campos 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.