Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994–2016
Poetry
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
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 poems thirty-one of which have never been… previously published in a collection pull 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 itself its sounds channeled through our hearts and lungs its rhythms amplified through the stethoscope to make meaning of our bewilderment when our bodies so eloquently and yet wordlessly fail us Campo s 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