It’s Here: Sesquipedalian Rain Chant by Brooks Lampe
The press’s inaugural book is published — and we’re almost sold out.
We are publishing this a day early, because some moments deserve to arrive before their official date. And because we’re too excited!
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.
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
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I think I'm going to love this. Love the PNW, love spirituality, love poetry.