Stephen the Phlebotomist is about vampires, Jesus, and a year spent locked indoors. Written with unimaginable tenderness and humour, Lines’ poetry explores the turbulence of student life and the love it facilitates.
In this debut pamphlet, teenage trips to Claire’s Accessories are treated with same unwavering reverence as queer desire and lost crucifixes. Lines offsets the everyday with potently emotional in a meditation on mental illness, blood donation, and love. We sneak inside Lines’ heart and grow to understand her devotion to being devoted.
Nadia Lines
Photo credits to Genevieve Badia-Aylin
Nadia Lines is a 20-year-old poet living and studying in Cambridge, UK. She was a Foyle Young Poet of the year in 2019, and has won the Orwell Youth Prize and the Tower Poetry Prize. Her work has been published by The Mays Anthology, Epoque Press, The Keats-Shelley Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and perhappened, and extensively by The Young Poets Network. Nadia’s Foyle prize winning poem also features in Chris Riddell’s anthology ‘Poems to Save the World With’. She loves medieval mystery plays, instant noodles, and her dogs – Freddie and Smudge. Stephen the Phlebotomist is her debut poetry pamphlet.
For Keats
When I make my bed I think
of the women weeping in your
bedrooms, sighing through
those windows – your windows –
the ghost of the cat curling
about their ankles, your auburn
hair in a locket in a cabinet
next door. I wonder how splendid
or normal you looked in
the sun, looked under a candle,
looked out at the plum tree,
the steps, that sky. It’s raining,
John, bring a coat. Do you
have the same circle of parched
skin on the pad of your finger
that I do? When I was locked
in a little room I thought
of you relentlessly. The bells
at midnight. The bells
at 1 a.m. Can’t you see who it is
weeping in rooms for your
spooled up soul; for your
pent up genius; for your poor fiancée;
for preventable deaths; for death;
for you, John, for you?
