Hi friends,
What exciting news we have. In 2027, Ink & Ribbon Press will publish two new collections of poetry, both in limited editions: The Bones of the House Is Good by Andy Edge and The Blessed Hungry by Jane Ann Fuller.
They’re very different books. One is warm and funny about becoming yourself in middle age. The other holds grief throughout. Both are plainspoken, both are rooted in the Ohio Valley, and both the kind of book we founded Ink & Ribbon Press for.
The Bones of the House Is Good
Poems by Andy Edge
A man begins to transition at 43, inside a long marriage, and keeps paying the bills. Andy’s first collection is about change at an age when people expect you to be settled: a giddy pride over a first pair of jeans with deep pockets, eleven months of fighting an insurance company for permission to be himself, a neighbor who disagrees with nearly everything about him but still comes over to jump his truck when it snows, and a husband who stays.
It’s a book about how much a body can be remade while the man inside it stays who he always was. And it’s for anyone who has had to become themselves in plain sight, and keep the lights on while doing it.
“Look what all I can fit.”
from “Pockets”
Andy grew up in Martins Ferry, Ohio, the town James Wright wrote about, and he writes in the dialect he was raised on. Longtime readers may recognize his name: his poem “Full Sun” was longlisted for the 2026 LemonLight Prize. He also writes fiction, with stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and elsewhere, and he lives in Arizona with his husband and dogs.
Content note: these poems deal with gender dysphoria, medical transition, and everyday transphobia.
The Blessed Hungry
Poems by Jane Ann Fuller
The Blessed Hungry begins with a woman carrying her husband’s ashes in a cardboard box through her neighborhood at night, with only the bats and nightjars for company. The book stays with her there a good while before it lets anyone say what comes next.
Jane writes the long after. A wren packs and unpacks nests it will never use. A girl kneels in her father’s orchard while he sets the living trees on fire. A pair of steel-toed boots stands in a motel doorway without the man who wore them. And hunger runs under all of it: for the drink, for sleep, for someone’s hands, for peaches left to ripen in a paper sack. In the title poem, a curse on a cook who makes everyone wait turns into a blessing without anybody announcing it.
“The work of grief is a hunger.”
from “Sin Eater”
Jane was raised in rural Appalachia in southeastern Ohio, where she still lives. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her first book, Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021), was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. She runs Meadowlark Lodge, a poetry retreat in the Hocking Hills, and plays fiddle in a string band called The Trophy Wives. The Blessed Hungry was chosen from our 2026 open reading.
Content note: these poems deal with suicide, self-harm, addiction and recovery, and sexual violence.
What’s Next
Publication dates will be announced here first. Both books are limited editions, so subscribers will hear before anyone else.
Sample poems from each book are up now in the Reading Room on each book’s page: The Bones of the House Is Good and The Blessed Hungry.
Readings and events with Andy and Jane are in the works. We’ll share details as they’re set. But if you’re heading to AWP you’re in for a treat!
Out Now: The Lost Stations
One more thing before we go. Cara Waterfall’s The Lost Stations is available now and ships this week.
The book takes its title from the abandoned rail stops along Toronto’s Beltline Trail, where Cara once walked with her father. From that private grief it opens outward, to fossil records, migration, and damaged habitats, in centos, contrapuntals, and duplexes. It’s a limited edition paperback, $18.95.
And congratulations to Cara, who recently won Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize.
Our Open Reading Is Now Year-Round
The Blessed Hungry came to us through our open reading, and the next book on our list could too. Submissions are now open all year round: send a full manuscript of 40–100 pages or a selection of 15–25 poems. We read every one, and we respond to every poet.
Thank you for reading, and for making room in your life for a small press and the poets it believes in. We can’t wait to put these two books in your hands.
G.
Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Poetry. Crafted. Collected.