Our 2026/27 Publishing List
Four books. One prize. A publishing year that begins in June.
I’ve been sitting with this list for a while now, turning it over the way you turn a finished manuscript — looking for the thing that isn’t holding, the place where it gives. I haven’t found one. So it’s time to say it plainly: the inaugural publishing program for Ink & Ribbon Press is complete, and I’m genuinely proud of what it is.
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.
