Sesquipedalian Rain Chant, My Name Is Swan, and The Lost Stations have arrived safely at Poets House in New York and are now being processed for its annual Showcase.

For those unfamiliar with it, Poets House is one of the great homes of poetry in America. Its library holds more than 80,000 volumes, bringing together books from established publishers, small independent presses, limited editions, translations, chapbooks, and work that might otherwise disappear quietly into the world.

The Poets House Showcase gathers the year’s newly published poetry books and places them, gloriously and democratically, side by side. Our three books will be included in the exhibition, which runs from December 12, 2026 through February 28, 2027 at Poets House in New York.

This matters to us enormously.

Ink & Ribbon Press was founded on the belief that a poetry book can be more than a container for poems. It can be an object made with intention, something carrying a life inside it, something worthy of being kept. Knowing these books will be discovered, opened, and perhaps unexpectedly needed by a future reader is a beautiful thing.

Three books made by our tiny press on Bainbridge Island are heading to an exhibition in New York.

Not bad for a year’s work.

One Call for All

Ink & Ribbon Press is also now participating in Bainbridge Island’s One Call for All campaign.

One Call for All is one of those local institutions that reminds you what a community can accomplish when everyone gives a little, together. Through a single donation, people can support the nonprofit organizations doing cultural, educational, environmental, and social work across the island.

And now, poetry is part of that story too.

Your support helps us publish singular voices, produce carefully made limited editions, maintain our free online learning library, and create opportunities for poets whose work deserves a lasting home in print.

If you would like to support Ink & Ribbon through One Call for All, you can do so here:

SUPPORT INK & RIBBON THROUGH ONE CALL FOR ALL

Thank you, Bainbridge Island, for believing that poems matter, that books matter, and that making beautiful things carefully still has a place in the world.

The Swan Arrives October 1

Finally, My Name Is Swan by Jan Noble will be officially published on October 1.

This is a strange, lyrical, funny, tender book about names, memory, identity, belonging, and the stories we tell in order to understand ourselves. Jan’s voice is entirely his own. Part poet, part performer, part London cartographer of the human heart.

We have produced just 250 copies and they are flying (floating? gliding, perhaps) off the shelf.

Preorders are still open.

PREORDER MY NAME IS SWAN

Every preorder supports the next book, the next poet, and the next small act of unreasonable faith required to bring a manuscript into the physical world.

Poetry. Crafted. Collected.

Thank you, as always, for reading and for being part of this peculiar, beautiful little press.

G. K. Allum, President & Founding Editor
Ink & Ribbon Press

Share

A few things happening at Ink & Ribbon Press this month, and we wanted you to hear them straight from us.

We’re looking for editorial contributors

We’re building out our editorial bench, people who want to write essays on craft or review poems for the Learn section of the site. If you’ve got a strong point of view on how a poem works, or you love sitting with a new collection long enough to say something useful about it, we want to hear from you.

To be clear, this is not a call for poetry submissions. That’s a separate thing, and it’s below.

If you’re interested in writing for us, the details are here and please reply to this note https://inkandribbon.org/editorial-team

Volunteers needed for AWP Chicago 2027

We’ll be at AWP in Chicago this coming March with a booth, and we’re launching two titles while we’re there. We need a few hands on deck: people willing to work the booth for a shift or two, help with load in, and possibly lend a hand at an offsite event.

This is volunteer work, unpaid, but it’s a good way to be part of the press at one of the biggest gatherings in the country for people who care about this stuff. If that’s you and you’re already planning to be in Chicago, reply to this email or write to us directly and we’ll get you sorted.

Reading period is open

We are officially open for submissions again and looking for two to three more manuscripts to round out our 2027 list. If you’ve got a full-length collection that’s been waiting for the right home, or you know someone who does, now’s the time.

Submission guidelines are here: https://inkandribbon.org/submissions

And one more thing

The website has a new look. Go poke around, tell us what you think.

As ever, thank you for reading, and for being part of this with us.

Share

New rights: A Field Guide to Disappeared Things

We have acquired the rights to A Field Guide to Disappeared Things, a collection of prose poems by Sean Mclain Brown, forthcoming from Ink & Ribbon Press in a limited edition in Spring 2027.

The book borrows the form of the naturalist’s field guide, its taxonomies, its notes on weather and habitat and range, and turns that discipline of observation toward what a war, and the body that carried it home, causes to disappear. Two lines run the length of the book and eventually meet: a father who leaves for war in 1967 and comes home changed, and a son who later stands in the same recruit depot his father once passed through.

Brown is a combat-disabled Marine Corps veteran and a member of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veterans Writing Group, and this book is part of his ongoing project using reference-book forms, dictionary, field guide, technical manual, encyclopedia, as architecture for writing about war, inheritance, memory, and the body. We could not be prouder to bring it into print.

Read more and sample three poems from the manuscript: https://inkandribbon.org/a-field-guide-to-disappeared-things

Two fields, one table: launching at AWP Chicago this March

This is where the word repeats itself. This March, we will be launching two books at AWP in Chicago, and both carry field in the title.

Alongside A Field Guide to Disappeared Things, we will be introducing Field Sonnets, a sonnet sequence by Miranda Beeson, arriving in a limited edition and a small fine art run. The book takes its bearing from a field behind an old farmhouse and from a line of Paul Éluard’s, there is another world, but it is in this one, and moves between what can be observed in a field through the seasons and what can only be felt as that turning mirrors something deeper inside.

Read more about Field Sonnets: https://inkandribbon.org/field-sonnets

Two fields, two very different kinds of attention, and one press glad to be carrying both into the world at the same table in Chicago this March. We will have more to share about the AWP exhibit as the date gets closer.

Still open: pre-orders for My Name Is Swan

In the meantime, do not forget that pre-orders remain open for My Name Is Swan, Jan Noble’s three-part poetic epic arriving this October. Readers in the US, UK, and EU can find pre-order details here: https://inkandribbon.org/mynameisswan

You can listen to poet Jan Noble and myself on a recent edition of The New Books Network Newsletter and Podcast. An hour long interview available on all good streaming platforms.

The New Books Network Newsletter

Dipping Into the Inkwell

In this week’s newsletter…

Read more

22 days ago · 4 likes

Thank you, as always, for reading with us.

G. K. Allum (President & Founding Editor)

Ink & Ribbon Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publisher of poetry and fine books, based on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Share

A lot is happening at once this week, so let’s get right to it. In our first year, every week it feels like a lot of momentum is happening. Nearly 1 year into this, we have 4 poets, 1 successful prize launched and planning year 2.

Jan Noble, live tomorrow 8am PT / 1pm ET

Tomorrow we’re going live with Jan Noble, who will be reading exclusively from My Name Is Swan. This is your chance to hear an excerpt in his own voice, and believe me that in itself is an event. Come with questions if you have them.

Swan is shipping

Pre-orders for My Name Is Swan are open now, and we’ve begun shipping ahead of the October 1st release date. The website includes all three performances from the book, so if you want a sense of what you’re holding before it arrives, it’s there.

Order your copy: https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/mynameisswan

A bundle, while it lasts

If you want both of our current titles together, Sesquipedalian Rain Chant and My Name Is Swan, we’ve put together a bundle at an exclusive price. There are only 10 bundles left, and once they’re gone we won’t be restocking this particular offer.

Get the bundle: https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/bookbundle

Open Reading is open

We’re looking for three new poets to publish next year. Our open reading period is genuinely open. We want work from voices we haven’t heard from yet, and manuscripts that couldn’t be shuffled into any other shape. If that’s you, we’d like to see it.

Submit your work: https://inkandribbon.org/submissions

Thank you, as always, for reading closely and sticking with us.

G. K. Allum (President & Founding Editor)

Share

How this book was actually written

For ten years, Jan performed this poem the old way. Not in a lecture hall. In pubs. Hundreds of them, all over Britain and further afield, chasing every pub with the word Swan in its name down the Thames from Wapping to Oxford. He’s recited it aboard the Queen Mary 2 in the middle of the Atlantic, during the royal Swan Upping on the river, and on an island in Paris named after swans, because if you know Jan then of course this is what he’d do.

That’s not a marketing story. That’s just what the last ten years actually looked like for him.

What the book is

My Name Is Swan is really three works joined into one. The title piece follows a solitary voice downriver through the margins of a city. Reynard takes the old trickster fox and turns him into a hunted migrant on modern streets. Body 115 is a Dantean descent, built around the long unidentified victim of the 1987 King’s Cross fire.

River, city, underworld. One arc, three movements. This is the first time all of it has lived together as a single manuscript.

A poem that insisted on being heard before it insisted on being read.

The work has already had a life beyond the page. It won Best Narrative at the LA International Poetry Film Festival. Body 115 won Best Innovative Play at the London Pub Theatre Awards. It’s been on BBC Radio and on a syllabus at the University of Milan. John Nettles reads Reynard.

We’re publishing it as a limited edition print run, alongside a small fine art edition hand bound by McCall Bindery for those who want the object as much as the words.

Why we’re telling you now

If you’ve been watching what happens when we say limited, you already know why this letter is going out today instead of later. The Desire Lines anthology from this year’s LemonLight Prize sold out its entire run before we’d even sent it to print, six weeks ahead of launch.

Where to order

If you’re in the US, pre-order through the Ink and Ribbon store: https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/mynameisswan

If you’re in the UK or the EU, the easiest way in right now is through Jan’s own site: https://jannoble.co.uk/journeyworks/

Thank you for being here for this one. It’s been a long time coming, for Jan and for us.

G. K. Allum (President and Founding Editor of Ink & Ribbon Press)

Share

Dawn McGuire, for her poem “Mule.”

Leila’s citation, in full:

“What drew me to this poem is its honest, plain-stated tenderness. I admire a poem that says what it means, that doesn’t try to obscure its truths. This poem sings with the language of medicine alongside that of the everyday — ‘Embarcadero’ and ‘Hair Doc,’ ‘omentum’ and ‘amyloid.’ This poet has a keen eye for detail and knows when to call up an evocative image, and when to simply say what is. ‘When I carried my boy I felt worthy.’ This poem is a tender ode to the body, to the self, when it is not necessarily easy to do so — we need more poems like this.”

Dawn is a poet and neurologist living in Orinda, California — a physician-writer whose work brings the vocabulary of medicine into the lyric register without either apologizing for the technical language or performing it. That the inaugural LemonLight winner writes about the body from inside a medical practice feels right for a prize named after a poem that turns on thresholds — half dawn, half memory, the moment between what was and what might be.

Dawn receives $2,000, featured placement in the anthology, and a long-form interview on our Substck this September.

The four honorable mentions:

• Michael Emmanuel — “Bus Ride” — from Knoxville, Tennessee

• Charles Grosel — “Another Man’s Clothes” — from Phoenix, Arizona

• Caroline Mellor — “A Million Tiny Miracles Every Second” — from East Sussex, United Kingdom

• Carlos Andrés Gómez — “Home Is Not An Address” — from New York

Each honorable mention receives $250, featured placement in the anthology, and a featured interview.

The five selections were made from a shortlist of 51 poets, itself drawn from 706 entries submitted from eight countries. Leila read the shortlisted work blind — she is seeing the names for the first time today, alongside the rest of us. The final cut, from 51 to five, was by her account the hardest reading of the process. Different readers on different days would have built different lists.

To the 46 poets on the shortlist who were not selected today: your poem was read closely, published in an anthology of 250 copies that sold out six weeks before printing, and placed in company Leila and I found remarkable.

To the 100 longlisted, and the 706 who sent work: thank you. There is no version of this year in which the field wasn’t stronger than we had any right to expect.

The anthology mails in September to all recipients. A small number of Sesquipedalian Rain Chant remain, if you have not yet held one of our books — the debut publication that started the press, and the reason many of you first heard of Ink & Ribbon. Sesquipedalian Rain Chant →

The 2027 LemonLight Prize opens for submissions in spring.

With gratitude to Leila, to the poets, and to every reader who trusted us this year.

— G. K. Allum (Founder & Presidenet)

Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The LemonLight Prize is our annual award for a single poem, judged blind by a working poet each year.

Share

We didn’t know what to expect. The Poetry Library was still young, the ask was informal, and we weren’t sure whether a corner of the internet built around a small nonprofit press would produce serious readers willing to do the unpaid, unglamorous work of close criticism. We were wrong to worry. The response was immediate, and it was good, not just enthusiastic, but genuinely sharp.

Over 6,000 of you now read along with us here, and it turns out a meaningful number of you also want to write.

Three new pieces went up in the library this month, and I want to point you toward all three, because each one does something I don’t think we could have written ourselves.

I Am Woe: Ophelia’s Lament and the Making of a Self in Hamlet

by Avery Harris

Avery takes on one of the quietest, most overlooked speeches in Hamlet — Ophelia’s lament after Hamlet’s rejection — and argues that it’s the moment Shakespeare finally lets her define herself, in the only language grief leaves available to her. The reading moves outward from there, into Sufjan Stevens and the long tradition of lyric lament.

Read it here →

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

by Niharika Agrawal

Niharika reviews Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin — seventy poems under the exact same title, and an argument for why that repetition is the whole point of the book.

Read it here →

When Logic Meets Choice: Reading Millay’s Love Is Not All

by Shivani Trivedi

Shivani close-reads Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love Is Not All,” making the case that the sonnet isn’t really about love at all — it’s about the burden of having to choose.

Read it here →

Which brings me to the actual news: we’re looking for more contributors.

We’re looking for writers who can commit to two pieces a month for the library — close readings, reviews, craft essays, whatever your particular obsession is, as long as it’s rigorous and it’s yours.

The ask is simple, and we want to be upfront about it. No AI-assisted writing; we want your sentences, not a model’s. In return, contributors get discount codes on our books, and as the press grows, we intend for that list of benefits to grow with it.

If that sounds like you, or like someone you’d send this to, just reply to this email and tell us what you’d want to write about. We read every reply.

More soon, G. K. Allum

Share

The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology — a limited edition of two hundred and fifty copies, hand-bound and mailed in September — has sold out. Two months before it prints, six weeks before it ships, and forty-eight hours after the shortlist was announced.

Two hundred and fifty is a small number by publishing standards - although one of the greatest ironies is that poetry books do not sell, and if they do it’s around a couple of hundred. But two hundred and fifty is a real number for us in Year One of our press. It means that two hundred and fifty readers — poets who submitted, longlisters, shortlisted contributors, Ink Well subscribers, donors, friends of the press, and a surprising number of people who just heard about it and decided to trust a new publisher with a bold visiona, and put their names on something they had not yet held. They read what the press stood for, and they said yes.

That is the entire proposition of what we’re trying to do here. Poetry, crafted, collected. Books that carry a life inside them, made by people who care about how they’re made, sold to people who care about the same.

To everyone who pre-ordered: thank you. To the fifty-one shortlisted poets, whose work will now reach readers who will hold this book alongside titles they return to for decades: you have chosen well, and I am grateful for the work you sent. To Leila Chatti, whose reading has shaped this from the first cut to the last: thank you. The winner and the four honorable mentions will be announced in early August.

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant →

Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. We publish limited editions of unified poetic works and select one poem each year through the LemonLight Prize. This year, we published our first book, opened our first prize, closed our first anthology, and grew The Ink Well past 6,500 readers. None of that happens without you.

The 2027 LemonLight Prize opens in the spring.

With warmth and thanks,

G. K. Allum

Share

Today we’re announcing the shortlist.

We said we would name fifty. We are naming fifty-one. There was a poem we couldn’t leave out.

The LemonLight Shortlist — 51 Poets →

Unlike the long-list, this is more than a recognition. Every one of these fifty-one poets will have a poem published in The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology when it appears in September — a limited edition of 250 copies, produced to the same standard we bring to everything we publish.

From this shortlist, Leila Chatti will select the overall winner and four honorable mentions. That announcement comes in early August. Judging has been conducted blind throughout: Leila has been reading the work, not the names attached to it, from the first cut to the last.

If you’re on the shortlist: congratulations. Your poem will appear in the anthology alongside fifty others whose work made it through what has been the closest reading I’ve done in some time. That’s worth marking.

If you were long-listed but did not make the shortlist: I know it stings. The cut from one hundred to fifty-one was as hard as any part of this process, and there is no version of the list that would have been objectively right. The certificate we sent last month was sent in earnest — the longlist is a genuine standing, and I hope you’ll send us work again.

The anthology mails in September.

Amazingly, only around at the time of writing this ONLY 15 COPIES remain of the print run of 250 — the run is limited by design, and once it closes, we do not reprint.

Pre-order the Anthology →

Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The LemonLight Prize is our annual award for a single poem — $2,000 to the winner, 4x honorable mentions recognized in the anthology who each get $250, and 46 other poets featured..

Share

Today, we’re announcing the longlist.

One hundred poets have been selected from those 706 entries. You can find the full list at the link below, and we hope you’ll take a moment to read it — not just to look for your own name, but to register what the list represents. These are one hundred writers who submitted serious, ambitious work on a theme that asked something of them, and the range of what came back was genuinely remarkable.

The LemonLight Longlist — 100 Poets →

From this longlist, fifty poets will be selected for the shortlist, announced in early July. Those fifty poets will each have a poem included in The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology — a limited edition of 250 copies, produced to the same standard we bring to everything we publish. The prize winner and four honorable mentions will be announced in early August.

Judging is conducted blind throughout, by Leila Chatti.

If you’re on the longlist: congratulations, and thank you for the quality of what you sent. If you submitted and aren’t on the list: we read everything, and there was no easy cut. The standard made every stage of the process harder, and that’s a good problem to have.

The anthology pre-order is open. Half the print run of 250 copies has already been claimed.

Pre-order the Anthology →

Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The LemonLight Prize is our annual award for a single poem — $3,000 to the winner, honorable mentions recognized in the anthology.

Share

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant by Brooks Lampe is now available.

After more than a year of editorial work, design, production, and the slow, careful labor that a first book deserves, the debut publication of Ink & Ribbon Press is in the world. You can order your copy today on our website

We should tell you something important before we say anything else: we have approximately 50 copies remaining.

Pre-orders fulfilled in the months leading up to publication, and our partners at Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Bainbridge Island, Liberty Bay Books in Poulsbo, and Arundel Books in Seattle have already taken their allocations. This is a limited edition of 250 copies — hand-numbered, produced with care, and designed to last. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

About the Book

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant moves through a year shaped by rain, language, and belief, bringing domestic life and ancient voices into conversation. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, the poems treat rain not as backdrop but as practice — a recurring force that unsettles certainty and returns attention to love, faith, labor, and speech.

Organized as a passage through the seasons beginning in September, the book draws on spiritual, poetic, and philosophical traditions without retreating into abstraction. Religious and classical figures appear not as ornament, but as presences woven into kitchens, classrooms, trails, and letters written beneath gray skies. The poems ask how coherence might be lived without simplification, and how meaning might arrive through patience rather than declaration.

At its core, Sesquipedalian Rain Chant affirms language itself. The collection embraces precision, layered thought, and the music that emerges when attention is sustained. Neither ironic nor sentimental, the book offers seriousness without austerity and wonder without naïveté.

This is a book for readers drawn to poetry that holds depth and mystery — and who are willing to be changed not by certainty, but by the steady persistence of rain.

$18.95. Hand-numbered. Limited to 250 copies. Order your copy here.

Congratulations, Brooks

We want to say it plainly: it has been a privilege to publish this book.

Brooks Lampe teaches literature and creative writing, and brings to his poetry the same rigorous attention, and passion, he brings to his scholarship — work that has engaged Surrealism, literary history, and belief across journals including Utriculi, The Shore, and Peculiar Mormyrid. He is the poetry editor of Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, edits the Substack Uut Poetry, and holds a PhD from The Catholic University of America.

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant is his first book. We hope it is the first of many.

Congratulations, Brooks. This one was worth every word.

What Comes Next

Our Reading Period Is Open — Year-Round

We are actively seeking poetry manuscripts for our 2027 and 2028 publishing lists.

Our Open Reading Period is now continuous — no submission windows to miss. If you have a unified manuscript (and by that we mean a book that could not be shuffled, a work that required its particular form), we want to read it.

Submit at inkandribbon.org →

My Name Is Swan by Jan Noble — Coming October 2026

Our next book is on its way.

Jan Noble’s My Name Is Swan brings together, for the first time in print, a celebrated trilogy as a single unified manuscript — a modern epic in three movements: river, city, underworld. Works that have lived across film, theatre, radio, and recording are gathered here into a definitive literary object. We’ll have much more to share in the months ahead.

AWP Chicago — March 2027

We will be a premium exhibitor at AWP Chicago in March 2027. If you’re planning to be there, come find us. We’d love to meet you in person, put a book in your hands, and talk poetry.

See you in Chicago.

How to Support the Press

Ink & Ribbon Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Everything we do — every book, every prize, every carefully made object — is sustained by readers who believe this work matters.

There are two direct ways to support us:

Donate at inkandribbon.org → — a one-time or recurring gift goes directly toward production, editorial work, and prize funding.

Become a paid subscriber here on Substack → — your subscription supports the community and keeps The Ink Well running as a free resource for poets and readers.

Both mean more than we can easily say.

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant is available now, while copies remain. Order at https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/sesquipedalian-rain-chant

Thank you for being here for this.

— G. K. Allum, President & Founding Editor, Ink & Ribbon Press

Something has been taking shape on our website, and this week it crossed a threshold worth telling you about.

The Learn section at Ink & Ribbon Press — what we’ve started calling The Poetry Library — now contains seventy essays, guides, close readings, reviews, and lists covering poetry from almost every angle we could think of. How to read it. Who shaped it. How individual poems work, line by line. How to write a manuscript, where to send it, what the field actually looks like from the inside. The history of the sonnet. Mary Oliver. Ocean Vuong. The Waste Land, explained without defeating you. What makes a great ending.

Seventy pieces. Grown steadily, without much announcement, over the past year.

This week we formalized it’s home: inkandribbon.org/learn.

The ambition, plainly stated

We want The Poetry Library to become the best resource for poetry education, criticism, and craft on the internet. Not one of the best. The best.

That is not a modest goal, and we know it. But we think it’s the right one. There is no single place online that does all of this well — that treats readers and students and working poets as intelligent adults, that offers genuine criticism alongside clear explainers, that covers the tradition and the living in the same breath, without a paywall, without advertising, without the particular flattening that happens when a site tries to please everyone at once.

We are a nonprofit press with a specific editorial sensibility. That is, for this purpose, an advantage. We are not trying to rank for everything — we are trying to be genuinely useful to people who care about poetry. Those are different projects, and we think ours is the more achievable one.

The library currently draws around 6,000 visits per month, and that number is growing. But seventy pieces, however good, is not a destination. A destination requires depth, range, and regularity — new thinking arriving often enough that a reader has a reason to return. That is what we are building toward, and it is why we are writing to you today.

What the library covers

The library is organized into seven sections, each a distinct kind of writing:

Poets & Traditions — Introductions to the major figures and the movements that shaped them. From the Romantics through the modernists to the poets working right now. Currently 24 essays.

Close Reading — Individual poems taken apart line by line. Frost, Dickinson, Poe, Eliot, Angelou, Clifton, Thomas, Shakespeare, and more. Not summaries — readings. Currently 13 pieces.

Practical Guides — The honest version of how the poetry world works. Submitting, formatting manuscripts, prizes, MFA programmes, small press publishing. Currently 13 guides.

Foundations — The structures behind poetry publishing explained. What a press is, what a colophon is, what makes a limited edition worth collecting, why literary journals exist. Currently 10 pieces.

Reviews — Considered criticism of recent collections. Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Victoria Chang, Harryette Mullen. Currently 5 reviews.

Editorial — The essays where we argue for something. On first lines, on endings, on why poets should read the living as well as the dead. Currently 3 essays.

Lists — Curated recommendations, chosen for conviction rather than consensus. Currently 2 lists.

Seven sections. Room in all of them for more.

An invitation to contribute

We are opening The Poetry Library to contributors, and we would like you to consider whether that might include you.

The Ink Well community contains some of the most serious poetry readers, writers, critics, and academics we know. Many of you are working poets, MFA students and graduates, teachers, editors, booksellers. Some of you have been reading poems carefully for decades. That knowledge and attention is exactly what this project needs.

Here is what we are offering: a published essay, guide, close reading, review, or list in The Poetry Library, under your own byline, with your own author profile on the site. Not a guest post buried in a blog archive — a permanent piece in a growing reference library, attributed to you, linked to your work and your bio, visible to every reader who finds the library through search or through us. As our traffic grows, so does the visibility of every piece in it.

The work is voluntary. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we cannot pay contributors at this stage. What we can offer is editorial attention, a serious platform, a growing audience, and the particular satisfaction of contributing to something built to last rather than to scroll.

What we’re looking for:

We are not prescriptive about topic, but we are prescriptive about quality. A piece for the library should be genuinely useful or genuinely argued — an essay that makes a case, a close reading that earns its conclusions, a guide that tells the honest version rather than the polished one. We are not looking for content. We are looking for thinking.

The seven sections above are the current map, but we are open to pieces that don’t fit neatly — if the work is strong and the argument is clear, we will find it a home.

The practical details:

We ask for a commitment of at least one piece per fortnight — ideally one per week — so that the library grows at a pace that justifies calling it a destination. We are not looking for occasional contributors; we are looking for people who want to build something over time.

All pieces are reviewed editorially before publication. We will work with you to get a piece to the standard the library requires. We will not publish something that isn’t ready, and we will tell you honestly if something isn’t working and why.

If you are interested, write to us at admin@inkandribbon.org with a brief note about who you are, what section of the library interests you, and — if you have one — a short pitch or an example of your critical writing. We will respond to every enquiry.

The library is at inkandribbon.org/learn. We are glad it exists. We think it can become something worth pointing people to for years.

We hope some of you will want to help build it.

— G. K. Allum Founder & Editor, Ink & Ribbon Press

Share

It did.

706 entries. Over 3,500 poems. Poets from eight countries.

We have been sitting with those numbers as the prize came to an end, and they still don’t feel entirely real. What they tell us is not just that poets wanted a prize to enter — there are plenty of those. They tell us that something about what Ink & Ribbon is trying to do resonated. That the poets who found us saw, in what we are building, something worth the fifteen dollars and the vulnerability of sending work to a press they were still getting to know.

We are grateful for that trust in a way that is difficult to put into words. Every one of those 706 submissions will be read with care, in the way it was submitted. We don’t take that lightly, and nor do our editors.

What Happens Next

Here is the timeline:

Shortlist announced — mid to late July

Winner and honorable mentions announced — August

Anthology mailed to all pre-order recipients — late August into September

We will share the shortlist here on Substack before it goes anywhere else. If you entered, that is where you will hear first.

The Anthology

125 copies of The LemonLight Prize 2026 have already been claimed — out of a print run of 250. Once you account for prize recipients, bookstore partners, and our press archive, what remains for general order is genuinely small.

If you want a copy, now is the right moment:

Order The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology →

This is the record of what 706 poets made possible. It will not be reprinted.

One More Thing

In the months since we launched the prize, something else became clear: the demand for a place to send full manuscripts — not prize submissions, but the larger, slower work of a complete collection — was consistent and real. Poets were writing to ask when our reading period would open.

So we made a decision. Our open reading is now open year-round.

No windows. No waiting. If you have a manuscript ready — or a selection of poems that reflects a larger vision — we want to read it. We read everything ourselves, and we respond to every submission.

Submit to Ink & Ribbon Press →

Reading fee is $15. Response time is 6–10 weeks. We are looking for work that could not be shuffled — collections where the whole cannot be broken without loss.

Thank you for being part of this. The LemonLight Prize exists because poets showed up for it, and what we read over the next two months is a direct result of your belief that this kind of press is worth having in the world.

We think so too. Now time to brew some coffee and work through the judging!

— G. K. Allum Founding Editor, Ink & Ribbon Press

inkandribbon.org · Bainbridge Island, Washington

Share

$15 to enter. $3,000 in prizes. Judged by Leila Chatti.

This is what we make. The fine art edition of Sesquipedalian Rain Chant — hand-bound in crimson with gold tooling, housed in a clamshell — is one of three copies in existence.

Every book we publish is made to this standard of care.

Shortlisted and highly commended poets from the LemonLight Prize will be considered for our 2027 publishing list.

Submit at inkandribbon.org.

Sunday May 31st is the last day.

Share

Share The Inkwell - Ink & Ribbon Press

If you’ve been sitting on a poem — holding it, turning it, not quite ready — this is the week. Send it.

The prize: $3,000 total ($2,000 to the winner, four honorable mentions at $250 each). Judged by Leila Chatti. Open to all poets writing in English, anywhere in the world.

Entry: $15 per poem. Or enter for $30 and receive a copy of the LemonLight Prize Anthology — a limited-edition volume gathering the winner, honorable mentions, and a curated selection of finalists: over forty poets in print. The anthology is produced to the same standard as our full publishing list. Copies are very limited.

Submit at inkandribbon.org.

A few other things worth knowing this week.

Sesquipedalian Rain Chant is officially here.

Brooks Lampe’s debut — the first book from Ink & Ribbon Press — publishes on June 14th. You can order it now at https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/sesquipedalian-rain-chant, or find it exclusively in person at Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge Island. Dense, percussive, formally assured: a book that earns every word. As Billy Collins put it when he came across our work: “You do nice books.” We think so too.

Ink & Ribbon Press is now part of Bainbridge Gives.

We’re glad to share that we’ve been accepted into the Bainbridge Community Foundation’s Bainbridge Gives campaign. If you’ve been looking for a way to support the press — and the poets we publish — this is a good moment. Every gift goes directly toward our publishing program, our prizes, and keeping serious poetry in print.

Donate at bainbridgegives.org

Open Reading Period: Full Manuscripts · Opens June 15th.

Our next open reading period for full poetry manuscripts opens on June 15th. If you have a collection that couldn’t be shuffled — a book that required its particular form — we want to read it. More details on the submission guidelines are on our website.

One week. Send the poem.

— Ink & Ribbon Press Poetry · Crafted · Collected

Created by the nonprofit literary publisher Ink & Ribbon Press, the prize offers:

• A $3,000 award

• Publication with Ink & Ribbon Press

• Inclusion in The LemonLight Anthology, a limited-edition volume celebrating emerging and established poetic voices

Submissions close May 30, 2026.

Ink & Ribbon Press is devoted to poetry as a crafted, physical art form — carefully designed books, small print runs, and the long life of the poem in print. The press publishes limited editions intended not simply to be consumed, but kept, returned to, and remembered. As we often say:

We publish fewer books, but we make them unforgettable.

The LemonLight Prize sits at the center of that vision: a prize designed not around scale or speed, but around discovery, editorial care, and permanence. Alongside the winning manuscript, The LemonLight Anthology - Desire Lines will feature more between thirty and forty selected from this inaugural reading period — creating a collective snapshot of contemporary poetry across emerging and established voices alike.

At a time when so much publishing has become disposable, we remain committed to making books that feel lasting: tactile, durable, and deeply considered.

If you have been considering submitting work, this is the moment.

Submissions close May 30th.

Enter The LemonLight Prize

Submit Here

Share

Four debut collections. A prize anthology. Books that span from Oregon to Toronto, from the liturgical to the geological, from a single sustained sonnet sequence to a modern epic that began in film and theatre before it ever found a page. I didn’t plan a “range.” I applied one question to every manuscript I read — could this book be shuffled? — and kept only the ones where the answer was unambiguously no. These four passed. Nothing else I read this year did.

Here’s what’s coming.

June 2026 — Sesquipedalian Rain Chant by Brooks Lampe

Brooks opens the list, which feels right. Sesquipedalian Rain Chant is the most uncompromising thing I’ve read in years — a sequence of long, percussive poems that treat language itself as the primary material. Dense and musical and formally serious. It doesn’t ask for patience so much as it assumes you have it. Brooks is a writer who refuses shortcuts, and the manuscript earns every word.

October 2026 — My Name Is Swan by Jan Noble

Jan’s work has lived in film, theatre, radio, and recording. My Name Is Swan is the first time the full trilogy appears in print as a single unified manuscript — a modern epic in three movements: river, city, underworld. It’s one of those books that makes you realize the poem and the page were waiting for each other. Jan’s Body 115 won Best Innovative Play at the London Pub Theatres Awards; the poetry film work took Best Narrative at the LA International Poetry Film Festival. The book is something else again.

December 2026 — The Lost Stations by Cara Waterfall

Cara’s debut takes its title from the decommissioned rail stops along Toronto’s Beltline Trail — overgrown now, barely traceable. In three movements (Traces, Vessel, Tracks), the collection holds grief at multiple scales: ecological, domestic, familial. It’s formally inventive — centos, contrapuntals, duplexes, zuihitsu — but the form is never the point. The humanity is. Cara is a CBC Poetry Prize shortlistee and a three-time Coniston Prize finalist, and this is the book that will introduce her to a much wider readership.

March 2027 — Field Sonnets by Miranda Beeson

Miranda’s sonnet sequence chronicles life and time through the turning of a single field behind an old farmhouse. The whole arc held in a sustained form. Paul Éluard: There is another world, but it is in this one. I’ve been thinking about that line a lot since I first read the manuscript. Field Sonnets does what only the best poetry manages — it moves between what can be observed and what can only be felt, and makes you feel the distance between those things as something almost physical. Miranda received the 2026 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Award and Palette Poetry’s Spotlight Award. The book comes out in March, timed to the season it describes.

The LemonLight Prize Anthology

Alongside the four collections, we’re publishing an anthology drawn from the inaugural LemonLight Prize — a single poet, judged by Leila Chatti, open to all. The anthology will include the winner, honorable mentions, and a curated selection of finalists: over forty poets in all, in a volume produced to the same standard as everything else we make. The prize theme was Desire Lines. Submissions close May 30th. Details at inkandribbon.org.

Each of these books is printed in a limited edition of 250 copies, with a small number of fine art editions hand-bound by Nate McCall at McCall Bindery in Poulsbo. All typeset in Besley. All designed to last.

The first pre-orders open July 1st for My Name Is Swan, with the others to follow at roughly three-month intervals ahead of each publication date.

I’ll be writing more about each of these books between now and their publication dates — the manuscripts, the poets, the making of them. That’s what this space is for. But for now, I wanted you to see the whole list together, the way I’ve been seeing it.

It’s a good year to start a press.