Landscape with Human Figure

In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of Americas 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, Campos poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us togetherjust as did the incantations of humankinds earliest healersinto 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.