To get at the mysterious inner essence of human experience requires an almost savage preoccupation with attentiveness. By keenly looking outward, then corkscrewing deeply inward, Neil Carpathios attempts to locate and "understand / the origin of all tears." What is the function of sadness? How can one know delight in a world of conflict, pain, and loneliness? How do birth and death overlap in this miraculous place? Clues are uncovered to these and other questions in surprising moments, such as when the poet eavesdrops on two angels hovering in the corner of his dying mother's hospital room, or when a homeless friend describes the art of homelessness. Ghosts are everywhere, as are the flesh and blood people that make life worth living. In poems of rare and raw honesty and directness, Carpathios invites the reader into the beautiful, and awful, silences of his heart.
Neil Carpathios is the author of five previous full-length poetry collections: Far Out Factoids (FutureCycle Press, 2017), Confessions of a Captured Angel (Terrapin Books, 2016), Beyond the Bones (FutureCycle Press, 2009), At the Axis of Imponderables (winner of the Quercus Review Press Book Award, 2007), and Playground of Flesh (Main Street Rag, 2006). An anthology he edited, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press), was released in 2015.
“These poems by Neil Carpathios focus on life as it streams around us and through us ‘with its beautiful chaos.’ They make us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. They get down to the real nitty gritty. The poet’s mother dies and he remembers her complaining that he does not write about her. His father, a physician, still buys things at the dollar store because he remembers being poor and hungry. A friend who was homeless for a year ate discarded Twinkies with ants on them. In the tears of this book we find the depth of our existence.”
—David Lee Garrison, Wright State University
“In this masterful collection, Neil Carpathios has perfected the art of paying attention. He reminds us that silence talks, that quiet moments matter, in poems that magnify our connections to one another—to the janitor who dances with his broom, to the man who sells God’s laughter in an empty jar, to angels who return to us in a lock of hair, in the sound of a wind chime.”
—Cathryn Essinger, author of My Dog Does Not Read Plato
“The Door on Every Tear is a kind of contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy. Carpathios’s gift is to show us, in unsparing detail, this difficult, broken world, and to give us a sense that we are all in this together, figuring out how to make sense of muddled, disappointed lives, those ‘hours alone / Saturday nights, chain-smoking, / drinking cheap wine.’ The marvel is that somehow, despite everything, he gives us reason for hope. Even joy.”
—George Bilgere, John Carroll University
“Neil Carpathios gives us whole worlds we know exist but haven’t actually seen. And what a welcomed revelation: his visions of these worlds are deep, bold, evocative—even sometimes horrifying but still valued. . . . He achieves what poetry is meant to achieve: fresh, new insight.”
—Nicholas Samaras, author of Hands of the Saddlemaker