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            Award-winning poet, Neil Carpathios, an English professor and coordinator of creative writing at Shawnee State University, has completed his third full-length poetry collection.
He is the author of two previous poetry collections, “Playground of Flesh” (MSR Press), and “At the Axis of Imponderables,” winner of the Quercus Review Book Award, as well as several award-winning chapbooks and limited edition works. “Beyond the Bones” is a collection of poems from Carpathios real-life experiences and from some of his earliest memories.
“Of all my three books, I’d say it’s the most tightly unified,” he said. “This one almost tells a story.”
            Carpathios keeps a journal of his poems. He writes about his children, his divorce, his experiences and one of his greatest influences who was his father, a surgeon.
“He used to tell me stories about his work when he came home and I didn’t think about it until I was older just how much of an impression those stories had on me,” Carpathios said. “A lot of my poems have the imagery of the body.”
            Carpathios continues the exploration of the body—in all its hungers, hurts, and intense passions, as well as the dark winding tunnels within the body.
            The shadows cast by the death of his father, by a divorce which forever changed his vision and experience of what it means to be a father, provide a balance for the sheer joys of living, which include imagining the erotic lives of worms, sharing a cigar with the ghosts of dead friends, and trying to catch laughs like butterflies in a net.
            Carpathios will be at Port City Pub in Portsmouth at a book signing on Saturday, Aug. 29, at 8 p.m. His book may also be purchased at www.amazon.com and at www.futurecycle.org.