The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry in Bloomington, MN

"Campo's gift is being able to describe the evolution of his manhood... fearlessly and with breathtaking honesty. He is truly a doctor of the soul."—Abraham Verghese
"Rafael Campo is that rare and exotic hybrid," raved the
Boston Globe
, "a doctor-poet, with a sensualist point of view that leads him to explore... the eroticism of healing-the laying on of hands." In this "unrelenting effort to humanize the medical profession" (
Publishers Weekly
), Campo turns the doctor-patient relationship inside out, writing not just of his attempts to heal, but of how his patients have healed him. He writes of campy Aurora, "dying of love"; the elderly woman telling of her trip to the country to pick "big-as-your-hands" peaches; a hateful addict he wished would die; and Gary, whom he feared to love, "contentious and gossipy and irreverent." Campo's work, "reminiscent of Chekhov... [in] the way language comes up out of the body" (
Los Angeles Times
), restores "the transcendent power of language to redeem" as, throughout the book, "the narrative, and the narrator, only get more luscious" (
Out
).