We have two pieces of news this week, and it turns out they share a word.
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.
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.