Lifeaholics Anonymous

(By Neil Carpathios)

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Author	Neil Carpathios

“Book Descriptions: 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 day—the 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”

Lifeaholics Anonymous

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