10/07/2025
We're thrilled to announce the publication of "The Mortician's Son," Maryland-based poet Kevin Roy’s debut chapbook and winner of our 2024 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Contest. This collection is an at times gentle, at times incising absorption into what we inherit, siphon off, transmit, and transmute.
Congratulations, Kevin!✨Bravo!
To order: https://linesandstars.com/ls-press/
“In The Mortician’s Son, Kevin Roy lays out the stations of the body — the body as a whole world and the world itself as a body. He shows that to exist is to be perpetually altered at a cellular level, blasted, and transformed, even in death. From the chemicals a mortician pumps into a co**se to a radiation bath below Chernobyl and the aftermath of cancer, these haunting lines shift mortality from a distant phenomenon to a process lodged deep beneath the reader’s skin. Roy offers a hymnal for the drowned and those touched by fire, a piano’s wild melody transmitted through the vibration of clenched teeth.”
— Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound, One Long Night, and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
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Kevin Roy is a professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. For twenty years, he has taught, mentored, conducted community-based life history interviews, and published more than fifty articles and book chapters. He has been writing poetry for even longer, published in Kestrel, The Shore, The Broadkill Review, Slant, Summerset Review (nominated for Best of the Net), and Rogue Agent (nominated for The Pushcart Prize).
