In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-physician Rafael Campo examines the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. As masterfully crafted as they are viscerally powerful, these poems propose voice itself as a kind of therapeutic medium. For all that most ails us, Alternative Medicine offers the balm of song and the salve of the imagination: from the wounds of our stubborn differences of identity, to the pain of alienation in a world of unfeeling technologies, to the shame of the persistent injustices in our society, Campo's poetry displays a deep understanding of hurt as the possibility for healing. Demonstrating an abiding faith in our survival, this stunning, heartfelt book ultimately embraces the great diversity of our ways of knowing and dreaming, of needing and loving, and of living and dying.


Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Campo is the author of The Enemy, Landscape with Human Figure, Diva, and What the Body Told, all published by Duke University Press. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Gold Medal in Poetry from ForeWord, the Paterson Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Campo’s poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Progressive, Slate.com, Yale Review, and The Threepenny Review.