Ink & Ribbon Press · Limited Edition · Spring 2027

A Field Guide to Disappeared Things

Prose Poems by Sean Mclain Brown

Prose Poems Limited Edition Paperback Spring 2027

A naturalist's field guide to what gets left behind. Each poem opens the way a field log opens — date, time, location, weather — along the California coast, the Chesapeake, the Midwest prairies. But the specimens under observation aren't birds or flora. They're a childhood, a father, a body before it went to war and came back changed.

These are not wounds, which scar and testify. These are the disappeared: things that leave a mark so small, only the most careful eye finds it.

Read Sample Poems

A Field Guide to Disappeared Things by Sean Mclain Brown — book cover

The guide ends where the field ends.
The field does not end. from “How to Use This Guide”

The Book, in the Author's Words

A record that resists its own promise of mastery.

“This book borrows the naturalist's field guide — its taxonomies, its notes on habitat and range, its attention to a species before it vanishes — and turns that attention toward what a war, and the body that carried it home, causes to disappear: a marriage, a season, a version of a father, a stretch of coastline eaten by a rising river. A field guide assumes a world that can still be catalogued, still be found again if you know where to look. I wanted to test that assumption against grief, where naming a thing correctly doesn't return it, and the record itself becomes a kind of elegy.”

“This book needed to be made because it was the gateway to writing the intergenerational weight of war that my grandfather, father, and I carried across decades as ‘warriors without a war,’ the struggle to reconcile the guilt of our actions during and after combat and service.”

“The other reference forms in this project carry an institutional confidence this book resists. A field guide is written by someone who still believes in another sighting. That hope, held against loss that doesn't resolve, is the tension the book lives inside.”

Edition Details

Title A Field Guide to Disappeared Things
Author Sean Mclain Brown
Genre Prose Poems
Publisher Ink & Ribbon Press
Publication Spring 2027
Format Paperback
Edition Limited Edition
ISBN TBA
Price TBA

Read Sample Poems

The Book

“What the field keeps, and what it doesn't”

A Field Guide to Disappeared Things borrows the form of the naturalist's notebook — weather, tide, species, the discipline of exact observation — and turns it on a family instead of a coastline. Two disappearances run the length of the book and eventually meet: a father who leaves for war in 1967 and comes home in the same boots with a different temperament, and a son who later stands in the same recruit depot his father once passed through, learning “the fine art of the rhetoric of persuasion, which is to say, I learned how to kill.” War doesn't arrive here as event or aftermath alone. It passes down like inheritance, tracked with the same patience a field guide brings to migration.

The book's method is its argument: grief, like a tidepool, rewards only the observer willing to hold still past comfort. Brown's speaker moves through tidepools and prairie floodplains, farmhouses and marine terraces, cataloguing absence in the vocabulary of a naturalist — dessication, transect, operculum — until the scientific term and the family wound become the same act of looking. By its final section, the book turns its instrument on the word that named the damage in the first place, working to reclaim “green” from “Marine,” ground from war.

From the Book · How to Use This Guide

This is a guide to disappeared things: childhood, the body before injury, the father before the war took him away. Not wounds—those persist as scars, and the scar, like the tree, bears witness. What we are after is what left no mark—or left one so small only the careful eye finds it. A remnant. A clue. A witness.

Begin with weather and time of day. These are not decoration—they are the conditions under which the disappeared becomes, briefly, visible.

Structure

The book unfolds in four parts.

Each section moves the field guide's method one station closer to home — from coastline, to self, to family ground, and back again.

I. Approaches

Approaches

The book opens along the Northern California coast, in tidepools and headlands, establishing the field guide's method: weather, time, location, the disciplined attention that lets what's disappeared become briefly visible. The father and a lost childhood surface here first, at the edges of the landscape.

II. Interior

Interior

The lens turns inward. The speaker returns for the first time to Parris Island, and to a woman he knew from childhood who “knew when to return” in a way he didn't. This section holds the book's psychological pivot — from observing the world to observing the self.

III. Homeground

Homeground

The book travels to the family's actual ground: a Midwestern farm, three generations of men, a father's 1967 deployment and 1968 return. Here the field guide's method meets its origin — the well his grandfather dug by hand, the boots by the door that disappear and come back changed.

IV. Return

Return

The book closes with a second return to Parris Island and a final reckoning with what the speaker carried out of his own service. The closing poem, “Green,” takes the word back from “Marine” — an ending that argues disappearance isn't only loss; it can also be a discipline of letting go.

Reading Room

Open the poems as if opening the field guide.

Three entries from the manuscript, each logged from a different station — observation, interior collapse, and the long walk back to a word that isn't Marine green.

Black Widow

Station I: Approaches

A spider in the redwood understory, held in a field note's flat exactness, until the poem turns and asks the reader to put it down “without any answers.” A compact demonstration of the book's method.

Aftermath

Station II: Interior

The collection's clearest statement of its own logic: “The aftermath is not what follows the event. The aftermath is the event, still occurring, under a different name.”

Green

Station IV: Return

The book's closing entry — a barefoot run back to a word that isn't “Marine green,” and the closest the collection comes to an answer.

Recognition & Publication

A voice shaped by witness.

Brown's work has been recognized by major prizes and placed in journals and anthologies across the country.

Recipient
Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize

Winner
Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, for his chapbook Shrapnel: a dictionary of damages

Journals & Anthologies
Indiana Review, Fourteen Hills, terrain.org, and more

Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
Anthology, Koa Books

Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War
Anthology, Scarlet Tanager Books

M.A. & MFA
San Francisco State University, mentored by Peter Weltner, Maxine Chernoff, Toni Mirosevich, Alice LaPlante, and Myung Mi Kim

Advance Praise

What early readers are saying.

“Stunning memoir prose poetry in the tradition of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, mythologizing a family's history. A third-generation Marine navigates the violence inherited from grandfather to father to son — the aggression in his father's presence, the recurring image of a ‘signature’ belt — telling the story second by second, decade by decade. The reader is absorbed, invited to collaborate with Brown's fragmented, sumptuous images of nature, death, beauty, and renewal.”

Maxine Chernoff is the author of nineteen books of poetry and six works of fiction. Winner of an NEA fellowship in poetry and a PEN Translation Award, she was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, former editor of New American Writing, and former chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She lives in Mill Valley, CA.

“Striking narrative prose poems weave childhood memory, nature, and war, showing that things don't actually disappear — that ‘the field does not end.’ A father's leather belt becomes a whip; ocean waves become a silent, healing rhythm in a field where fossils are found, both in the scars of body and memory and in the fractured shells of mollusks at the beach. Brown takes us to the green of fields ‘not Marine green,’ to the horses that heal veterans returning from war. If the work of a poet is to make the invisible visible, Brown is both magician and guide.”

Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of Red Thread (2012), Keeper of the Winds (2014), and Invisible Light (2018), co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, and Altadena Poet Laureate, 2018–2020.

About the Author

Sean Mclain Brown

Sean Mclain Brown is a poet, writing instructor, and combat-disabled Marine Corps veteran. He is the recipient of the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize and the winner of the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award for his chapbook Shrapnel: a dictionary of damages. His work has appeared in Indiana Review, Fourteen Hills, terrain.org, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Koa Books), and Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books), among other journals and anthologies.

He holds an M.A. and an MFA from San Francisco State University, where he was mentored by Peter Weltner, Maxine Chernoff, Toni Mirosevich, Alice LaPlante, and Myung Mi Kim. He teaches writing at De Anza College and is a member of Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Group. A Field Guide to Disappeared Things is part of his ongoing project, The Operator's Reference Set, which uses reference-book forms — dictionary, field guide, technical manual, encyclopedia — as architecture for writing about war, inheritance, memory, and the body. He lives in Santa Clara, California.

Combat-disabled USMC veteran

Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Group

M.A. & MFA, San Francisco State University

Stay Informed

Publication details and pre-orders coming soon.

A Field Guide to Disappeared Things will be published by Ink & Ribbon Press in a limited edition in Spring 2027. Follow the press's Substack for updates on publication date, pre-order availability, and events with the author.

Follow The Inkwell

7 September, 6:44 p.m. Redwood understory, Huddart County Park, Woodside, CA. Partly cloudy. Wind 3–6 mph SW, light and variable. Temp 68°F. Light slant and gold through the canopy, dew still on the lower ferns, sunset beginning to color the gaps in the ridge to the west. I went down through the woods to consider the ferns — fine soft green above the fronds' upper lip — and the beads of dew sliding down the aqueducts of spider webs in such an odd way I get dizzy. The spider, rushing toward the disturbance, hoping to find food, is not a solid object but so many separate bristles forming legs in motion on a perfect striped orb of black and brown. The spider crouches, turns toward me as if to say, Why? Above the canopy, a sky in drag — partly cloudy, cumulus, cirrus, seeded and heavy or thin like a ghost. So what about the wind and all its huffing and puffing, or the sunset — it isn't orange or rouge, something like sherbet or blood, so beautiful you have to snap a photo. And you know, they never turn out. Just a smudge in the sky, as if god snickered and dragged his finger down to the horizon. The same sky I began with. Only now, instead of rapture, you want to put this poem down. I leave the black widow's tense black body there waiting like this poem, without any answers. And you do. Field note, closing: The spider is still there. The photo did not turn out. The ferns held their dew until dark.

17 July, 6:12 a.m. Assateague Channel, southern crossing point, Chincoteague side of the bar. Overcast, burning off. Wind 4–6 mph SSE, negligible chop. Temp 74°F. Light low and copper, visibility clear to the treeline, tide ebbing, channel running slack at the turn, horses already in the water. I want to crawl back through the fissure of night, this morning, what dream, then coffee. Every morning the fissure opens again in the same place; the night does not seal what it opened. Coffee is the first honest thing. Before it, everything is still the dream arguing with the light streaming through the slit in the curtain by the window streaked with rain and gray light. The window is always streaked. This is what weather does to the membrane between inside and outside, which is the thinnest membrane there is next to skin. Gray light is the most honest light; it shows things as they are rather than as we prefer them; wings across water, morning star held course saying—follow me. The morning star does not care whether you follow. It holds its course regardless, which is the only instruction worth receiving. To follow a star is to accept that you will never arrive at it; the following is the point, not the destination. From the dark crest, stragglers and immigrants cast from the rough wave line, the ones the wave did not want, the ones the shore did not keep, moving without direction which is their direction. The children who refuse are the ones who have understood something the parents have not yet said aloud, they go to where obstinate children refuse parent's cries, where shadows peddle by on rickety bicycles made of clouds. The shadow on a bicycle is the most human shape: upright, moving forward, going somewhere, casting nothing behind it but more shadow. tongues wagging obscene gestures like old men who climb the skies with kites in search of lightening. the old men with kites are looking for the thing that will strike them; they have lived long enough to want to be struck by something true. Sand bagged and water logged after a week of storms, a flurry of blackouts. After the storm the alphabet floats. Every word you knew is slightly displaced, legible but wrong, like furniture moved an inch in the night by some poltergeist. A blackout is not an absence. It is a presence you were not there to witness; the world continued and you have the water damage to prove it. to sweep from shadow what form, bristles of a broom, this day. I swept the dark letters from the corner where they had gathered during the storm. They spelled nothing I recognized. I swept them anyway. shake motes from a dust-mop, when yearn, then time's vernacular. Dust is the vernacular of time; it says the same thing in every room, in every language, to anyone who looks and can never be cleaned up. Yearn is not the right word, but it is the only word; the right word is in the language time speaks when no one is listening. Lie down to sleep again and listen. Field note, closing: The aftermath is not what follows the event. The aftermath is the event, still occurring, under a different name.

Barefoot run in the grass after the war where I learned the fine art of the rhetoric of persuasion, which is to say, I learned how to kill. And later labeled the turbulent Marine, the insolent, the liar, the traitor. And then, I learned to turn my ear to the ground. To the green. To the living things beneath. There is life from green. Not Marine green. I said green. Let me say it again if you couldn't hear. I said green. Have you smelled it? Fresh cut. Wet with dew. Rinsed. It can make you whole again. There's no shame in it. Get down on all fours. Rub your hands in the soft hair of the earth where the trails of small things crisscross like interstate highways. Some live by the sword, some live by turn the other cheek, some live by what can be codified, categorized, claimed. In today's green, anything can be made, now it's always time to quit work, to quit war, to quit the incessant insurgence of blood, of red, turn red into green, as water into wine. And now, in the dusk, birds flit back and forth across the lawn, the damp grass grows, I whisper, go green, go.