On Christopher Hennessy

Mr. Hennessy's breathtaking poems interrogate the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, the charged space between Eros and Psyche. Part incantation, part dream, part gesture, his poems help us to enter into our own bodies again, to feel as if for the first time the thrill of a lover's caress or the sting of a fresh wound. Beneath this poet's lyrical gaze, the flesh is at once perfect and troubled, object of desire and yet unattainable, "a moon polished bark/burnished. Like his skin"—and as soon as we try to touch it, already spoiled, broken. Ultimately, Henessey's poems bear loving witness to our moment, when such disheartening developments as spiritual estrangement, AIDS, and environmental degradation, instead of further dividing us from one another, become opportunities for a profoundly nourishing empathic connection.

—Rafael Campo, author of four books of poetry and, most recently, The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry. He is a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.