Acknowledgments  xi

I. The Enemy  

Dialogue with Sun and Poet  3

Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002)  4

"Elsa, Varadero, 1934"  5

Night Has Fallen  6

Personal Mythology  7

Piranhas  8

Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics  10

El Viejo y la Mar  12

Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk  13

The Enemy  14

God, Gays, and Guns  15

Patriotic Poem  17

Post-9/11 Parable  18

Sestina Dolorosa  19

What Passes Now for Moral Discourse  21

from Libro de Preguntas  22

II. Eighteen Days in France  

Eighteen Days in France  27

III. Toward a Theory of Memory  

from Cien Sonetos de Amor  47

A Simple Cuban Meal  51

The Sailfish  52

Ganymede, to Zeus  53

After the Long Drive   55

For Jorge, after Twenty Years  57

Song in the Off-Season  60

Catastrophic Sestina  61

Toward a Theory of Memory  63

Patagonia  67

Defense of Marriage  68

The Story of Us  69

The Sodomite's Lament  71

Equinoctial Downpour  72

Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up  73

The Changing of the Seasons  74

Once, It Seemed Better  75

October, Last Sail  76

IV. Dawn, New Age  

Dawn, New Age  79

Allegorical  80

Progress  81

The Crocuses  82

Crybaby Haiku  83

"Silence=Death"  87

Clinical Vignettes  88

You Bring Out the Doctor in Me  90

Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton  92

Tuesday Morning  93

Arriving  95

Absolution  97

On Doctoring  98

Sick Day  99

Co-Winner, New England Poetry Club Sheila Motton Award

“The unusual audience Campo has built comes at least as much from his deft handling of rhyme and meter, and those skills are on evidence here more than ever. Rhyming pentameters, sestinas, villanelles, pantouns, rhymed haiku and monorhyme apply the tools of premodern verse to the trials and joys of contemporary life.”—Publishers Weekly

“In his latest collection of poems, Rafael Campo proves that he is a thoughtful poet whose self-examination is as ambitions as it is engaging.”—Thomas March, Lambda Book Report

“[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

“The Enemy is a representative collection of fine, anxious poems that express the difficulty of living in fear and the hope implicit in the act of living today.”—The American Poet

“In his latest collection, The Enemy, [Campo] slices into topics like gay marriage and the rush to the Iraq war, proving there are not just conservative veins running through the body of New Formalist work. . . . Campo's strength as a poet comes in recognizing that the political is very much the personal.” —Jaimee Hills, Independent Weekly

“A skilled craftsman, Campo works poetic forms to their best advantage. . . . ‘Art never gets it quite right,’ he declares--which may be true, but in Campo’s capable hands, it gets us most of the way there. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.”—Library Journal

“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

“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

“Reading , , . The Enemy makes me appreciate what intriguing religious poetry can come from someone outside of conventional religious practice. . . . Campo’s poetry has a light-heartedness at the same time as it embraces heavy issues like illness, war, death. So his religious language can be jesting without undercutting its genuine import.”—Peggy Rosenthal, “Good Letters,” the Image blog

“Campo has been called a political poet because he writes about life’s inequalities of class, power, war, sexual freedom and the tyranny of illness. He does so with a musician’s ear and an artist’s brush and leads us to smile and cry humbly at our world.”—Ronald Ruskin, Canadian Medical Association Journal

Co-Winner, New England Poetry Club Sheila Motton Award

“The unusual audience Campo has built comes at least as much from his deft handling of rhyme and meter, and those skills are on evidence here more than ever. Rhyming pentameters, sestinas, villanelles, pantouns, rhymed haiku and monorhyme apply the tools of premodern verse to the trials and joys of contemporary life.”—Publishers Weekly

“In his latest collection of poems, Rafael Campo proves that he is a thoughtful poet whose self-examination is as ambitions as it is engaging.”—Thomas March, Lambda Book Report

“[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

“The Enemy is a representative collection of fine, anxious poems that express the difficulty of living in fear and the hope implicit in the act of living today.”—The American Poet

“In his latest collection, The Enemy, [Campo] slices into topics like gay marriage and the rush to the Iraq war, proving there are not just conservative veins running through the body of New Formalist work. . . . Campo's strength as a poet comes in recognizing that the political is very much the personal.” —Jaimee Hills, Independent Weekly

“A skilled craftsman, Campo works poetic forms to their best advantage. . . . ‘Art never gets it quite right,’ he declares--which may be true, but in Campo’s capable hands, it gets us most of the way there. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.”—Library Journal

“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

“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

“Reading , , . The Enemy makes me appreciate what intriguing religious poetry can come from someone outside of conventional religious practice. . . . Campo’s poetry has a light-heartedness at the same time as it embraces heavy issues like illness, war, death. So his religious language can be jesting without undercutting its genuine import.”—Peggy Rosenthal, “Good Letters,” the Image blog

“Campo has been called a political poet because he writes about life’s inequalities of class, power, war, sexual freedom and the tyranny of illness. He does so with a musician’s ear and an artist’s brush and leads us to smile and cry humbly at our world.”—Ronald Ruskin, Canadian Medical Association Journal

“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

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