Verse Daily: About Lifeaholics Anonymous by Neil Carpathios

Today's poem is "Confessions of a Bullet"
from Lifeaholics Anonymous

Neil Carpathios is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Lifeaholics Anonymous (Kelsay Books, 2023). Previous books include Confessions of a Captured Angel (Terrapin Books), The Door on Every Tear (Wipf and Stock), Beyond the Bones (FutureCycle Press), Playground of Flesh (Main Street Rag), Far Out Factoids (FutureCycle Press), and At the Axis of Imponderables (winner of the Quercus Review Press Book Award). He also has a book of original aphorisms, The Lost Fragments of Heraclitus (Wipf and Stock), and he is the editor of the anthology, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press). He is the recipient of four Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. Currently, he is Writer-in-Residence at Malone University in Canton, Ohio.
Other poems by Neil Carpathios in Verse Daily:
January 5, 2021: "The Afterlife" "Two boys found her on the beach..."
November 2, 2016: "The Captured Angel Comments on Death" "It's a great invention...."
Books by Neil Carpathios:
 Other poems on the web by Neil Carpathios: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/neil-carpathios" target="_blank"> Two poems </a> <a href="https://kinliteraryjournal.com/poetry-carpathios-issue-4" target="_blank"> "When I Ask What the Secret of Life Is" </a> <a href="http://www.soul-lit.com/poems/V12/Carpathios/index.html" target="_blank"> "When the Cashier is Not Friendly" </a> <a href="http://unbrokenjournal.com/2019/09/23-neil-carpathios/" target="_blank"> Two poems </a> <a href="https://www.thesunmagazine.org/contributors/neil-carpathios" target="_blank"> Two poems </a> <a href="http://neilcarpathios.com/" target="_blank">Neil Carpathios's Website. </a> About Lifeaholics Anonymous: "Neil Carpathios is a force to be reckoned with. Perceptive, clear-eyed, and compassionate, the poems in Lifeaholics Anonymous, his remarkable new collection, provoke the idea of our common humanity at this disturbing moment in human history of otherwise deep social fragmentation. There is a wholeness to this book, the sense of a lived life. But lest the reader think all is calm or bright or tender, there are lines like these that take off the top of my head as from the poem 'When I See Used Needles'that concludes 'the veins, my brothers, sisters lying there/blissed out, the curb their pillow,/that blanket so snug like being in a cocoon or a womb,/their eyes rolling like slot machine cherries.' Wow." Stuart Dischell "In this delightfully quirky collection, Neil Carpathios celebrates the small miracles of every daythe crumb, the pebble, flies, bananas, thighs, hands. Each appears in his mindful attention alongside shadowy existential questions: 'Do flowers rehearse for when/one of them is plucked first?/Does any creature?/Why do I do this?' For this Vonnegutian life 'addict,' God is often a voyeur, and each day is an opportunity to wonder about his motives. Carpathios concludes, 'The secret is simply to be. The secret/are you listening?/is to simply love/being alive.' You'll want to read these poems again and again to feel how doubt presses against devotion and yields gratitude." Ellen Bass "Lifeaholics Anonymouscelebrates the small miracles in our lives and finds them in the neglected, the shunned, and the taken-for-granted. Marginal figures and objects are transformed into major players, conveying to the reader a sense of joy rare in contemporary poetry. His is a singular voice, not only in its content, but for his masterly control of all aspects of craft. Like William Blake, Neil Carpathios sees 'a world in a grain of sand/and a heaven in a wildflower.'" John Skoyles "Welcome to Neil Carpathios's Lifeaholics Anonymous where nothing, it seems, is too inconsequential, or too momentous, to escape his focus. How many poets can humanize a bread crumb and make you care about it? How many can speak with such acuity about our bodily and spiritual desires? Carpathios charts our loneliness, our biases, commonalities, and the profundities of life and love. Particularly notable, in this plethora of splendid poems, are those written with great tenderness for his wife and his ailing mother. They are among the most beautiful and touching I've ever read. How lucky we are to have this brilliantly realized book from such a gifted poet." Myrna Stone </blockquote> <center> <iframe src="//rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?o=1&p=12&l=ur1&category=tab_lnch_tradein_0810&banner=0107T58BJMV3C1M9TVG2&f=ifr&lc=pf4&linkID=b739c2879fbf52fd075535dadbf1084e&t=versedaily-20&tracking_id=versedaily-20" width="300" height="250" scrolling="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" style="border:none;" frameborder="0">
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