Pre-orders are open: My Name Is Swan
A decade recited in pubs. Now, finally, on the page.
Something to tell you today. Pre-orders for My Name Is Swan by Jan Noble are open.
How this book was actually written
For ten years, Jan performed this poem the old way. Not in a lecture hall. In pubs. Hundreds of them, all over Britain and further afield, chasing every pub with the word Swan in its name down the Thames from Wapping to Oxford. He’s recited it aboard the Queen Mary 2 in the middle of the Atlantic, during the royal Swan Upping on the river, and on an island in Paris named after swans, because if you know Jan then of course this is what he’d do.
That’s not a marketing story. That’s just what the last ten years actually looked like for him.
What the book is
My Name Is Swan is really three works joined into one. The title piece follows a solitary voice downriver through the margins of a city. Reynard takes the old trickster fox and turns him into a hunted migrant on modern streets. Body 115 is a Dantean descent, built around the long unidentified victim of the 1987 King’s Cross fire.
River, city, underworld. One arc, three movements. This is the first time all of it has lived together as a single manuscript.
A poem that insisted on being heard before it insisted on being read.
The work has already had a life beyond the page. It won Best Narrative at the LA International Poetry Film Festival. Body 115 won Best Innovative Play at the London Pub Theatre Awards. It’s been on BBC Radio and on a syllabus at the University of Milan. John Nettles reads Reynard.
We’re publishing it as a limited edition print run, alongside a small fine art edition hand bound by McCall Bindery for those who want the object as much as the words.
Why we’re telling you now
If you’ve been watching what happens when we say limited, you already know why this letter is going out today instead of later. The Desire Lines anthology from this year’s LemonLight Prize sold out its entire run before we’d even sent it to print, six weeks ahead of launch.
Where to order
If you’re in the US, pre-order through the Ink and Ribbon store: https://inkandribbon.org/store/p/mynameisswan
If you’re in the UK or the EU, the easiest way in right now is through Jan’s own site: https://jannoble.co.uk/journeyworks/
Thank you for being here for this one. It’s been a long time coming, for Jan and for us.
G. K. Allum (President and Founding Editor of Ink & Ribbon Press)