Lines + Stars

31/12/2024

A final 2024 offering!

Our latest issue, "In the Blood" -- featuring poems of parentage/parenting; breakage and connection; and histories expansive, intricate, and entrenched.

https://linesandstars.com/

Happy 2025, all. ✨

15/12/2024

Baltimore and surrounds: Want to participate in our seasonal Big Light Reading Series at the wonderful Atomic Books? Send us your work for consideration!

https://tinyurl.com/yhvf7ev8

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01/10/2024

Extended chapbook deadline: November 1st!

See our Submittable page for details: https://linesandstars.submittable.com/submit/295702/ls-press-2024-mid-atlantic-chapbook-series

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It's that time of year again!

Lines + Stars/L+S Press is seeking submissions to our 11th annual (1!) Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series, which publishes a mid-Atlantic-based emerging poet's first collection each fall. Deadline: October 1.

Investigate via our Submittable page here: https://tinyurl.com/3up582n5

Submit and spread the word, poet pals! Can't wait to review your work!

🌞✨💛

02/09/2024

Our fall/winter 2024 issue of Lines + Stars will focus on what is "in the blood": inheritance, family, traditions kept and broken, health and disease, unease, fervor and heat, what takes our energy, what gives energy to us, what is by turns warm and cold. What lies "in the blood" for you?

To submit: https://tinyurl.com/lsfall2024

Please do not send us anything overtly sanguinary. Only (if you must) sanguine.

Deadline: November 1, 2024.

Submit three to five poems or one piece of short fiction less than 2,000 words.

13/08/2024

Our Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series is rolling along -- and we want to see your poetry!

More here: https://tinyurl.com/3up582n5

Submission deadline: October 1.

It's that time of year again!

Lines + Stars/L+S Press is seeking submissions to our 11th annual (1!) Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series, which publishes a mid-Atlantic-based emerging poet's first collection each fall. Deadline: October 1.

Investigate via our Submittable page here: https://tinyurl.com/3up582n5

Submit and spread the word, poet pals! Can't wait to review your work!

🌞✨💛

22/06/2024

It's that time of year again!

Lines + Stars/L+S Press is seeking submissions to our 11th annual (1!) Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series, which publishes a mid-Atlantic-based emerging poet's first collection each fall. Deadline: October 1.

Investigate via our Submittable page here: https://tinyurl.com/3up582n5

Submit and spread the word, poet pals! Can't wait to review your work!

🌞✨💛

07/05/2024

Our latest chapbook author, Hannah Loeb (second from left), at her local book release/reading in Crozet, Virginia, last month. Thank you for hosting, Bluebird & Co.!

Also pictured: fellow readers Emmett Buckley, Henrietta Hadley, and Annie Persons.

🐩💘

12/04/2024

They've arrived!

The wonderful *Meats I Remember,* the debut poetry collection by Virginia-based poet Hannah Loeb -- winner of our 2023 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series -- is now available.

To order your copy: https://linesandstars.com/ls-press

THE YEAR

I think I signed a contract to this dark, parked
a car at the spring’s edge and prayed
true to it: blue bed, white toilet seat.
I had a student write that winter wasted her, her
mind a pillow of pronouns I gripped so hard
it inflated with a pop. A Pontiac
that I was driving wrong. The plop of soap
as the book on tape ends again, foam running white
where water later throngs. Cold armistice of May
which met me at the edge of her first song
wove of itself a longer year than I
would ever want. If I was wrong
to wrestle an obedience from the tube
of melted chapstick, mangled pink sand castle
where lotion should have been, and put the thing
I’d molded to my lip, then I was wrong
to claim I’d wring of any year a song.
It’s summer now, three cuts over James’s eye
as peanut butter slits my ice cream bar,
his skin a sweetly rusting sauna sky,
the white dog hacking algae in the yard,
the breakfast tray stained red with moldy berries,
and a pair of parakeet-shaped salad tongs:
the year rips in from on. The light lifts late
across the rental pond, withholding dark
from dark and lifting currants into season,
raising a pearl of harder water from
the furrow winter frowned into the yard.
The year was nothing; we did f*ck a lot
but not enough for him. I have been taught
to bear the autumn toward him in my arms.

🐩💖

27/03/2024

We're thrilled to present the glorious *Meats I Remember*, the debut chapbook from Virginia-based poet Hannah Loeb -- winner of our 2023 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series.

"*Meats I Remember* dismembers as it remembers, unraveling as it puts the body back together: ‘rot, proper[ ] rot’ pulps through, recycling in brilliant spools of assonance and consonance that weave these richly textured poems. The body becomes both the text and the author, the ‘ink mistress’ who creates the markings and the flesh that yields to them. In conversation with Ariana Reines’s *The Cow* and Lady Gaga’s meat dress, not to mention Shylock’s pound of flesh, Loeb’s poems are heart-melting and gut-wrenching. The meats range from dripping-raw to just-pink to burnt —and every variation is so well done.” —Adrienne Raphel, author of *Our Dark Academia*

Pre-order here!
https://linesandstars.com/ls-press

Cover Art: Emma Steinkraus, “Happy Animal” (acrylic on paper, 2017)
Cover Design: Marisa Grotte and Mary Ruth Robinson

🐩🐾👀💖🩷

08/02/2024

Robin Dellabough's "The Possibility of Perfection," from our latest issue.

🍂

01/02/2024

Thank you, as always, Atomic Books, for being a fab host to our first Big Light Reading of the year last Saturday!

Thanks, too, to brilliant wordsmiths Tracy Dimond, Kevin Roy, and Hannah Loeb for sharing their poetry.

Stay tuned for another reading in the spring!

29/01/2024

Thanks for this snap, Atomic Books! Saturday was just fantastic.

Pictured: the wonderful Tracy Dimond reading her work. Me hovering to the right.

✨💙❤️

Lines + Stars, happening now.

27/11/2023

We're pleased to announce the winner of the L+S Press 2023 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series: poet Hannah Loeb's wry and poignant "Meats I Remember."

Stay tuned for publication news in early 2024!

About the author:
Hannah Loeb is a poet and teacher based in Staunton, Virginia. She is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Virginia, where she is writing a dissertation under the direction of Jahan Ramazani. She earned her BA from Yale University in 2012 and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2015, and her poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Sequestrum, Ninth Letter, Booth, Ornery Quarterly, Gasher, American Chordata, Prodigal, Apricity Press, Oxidant | Engine, Oxford Poetry, The Moth, Digging Through the Fat, Mayday Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Plainsongs, Drunk Monkeys, and Soundings East.

Congratulations to you, Hannah!

Image: "A short horned cow." Lithograph by J. Ward, ca 1824. Wellcome Collection.

21/06/2023

This Friday at Atomic Books, buddies! Come join us.

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Join us at Atomic Books for our first Big Light Reading of the year! 2022 L+S Press chapbook winner Brad Kavo, Joellen Craft, and Rachel Charlotte Eisler will read their work.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1288302892084633/

Hooray!

14/05/2023

We've opened the submissions call for our next issue, "Red." Deadline: September 1st. Details here: https://tinyurl.com/2wdzfx34

In this strange heat
they motor across window-frame continents,
oceans of glass, red-brick deserts.
Busy going nowhere.
The smallest are barely here: grains
of strawberry Space Dust, spinning gems.
...

I try to blow the spiderling away
but Little Red holds on to the end
of a sentence – its Super Mite legs
barely visible. Brushed aside
it is forever blood across the page.

– From "Little Red," Sarah Wimbush, 2022

03/05/2023

Join us at Atomic Books for our first Big Light Reading of the year! 2022 L+S Press chapbook winner Brad Kavo, Joellen Craft, and Rachel Charlotte Eisler will read their work.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1288302892084633/

Hooray!