The Garbage Poems

by Anna Swanson, April White (Illustrator)

Overview

Featured on CBC Newfoundland Morning with Leigh Anne Power

Poems that repurpose the language of beer cans and fast-food wrappers to explore everything from chronic illness to climate crisis to the joy of wild swimming.

Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson's garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing a voice together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771316613
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	09/29/2025
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.51(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Anna Swanson (she/her) is a queer writer and librarian. Her first book of poetry, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010), won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has been widely published in journals and appears in anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry, Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, and Torah: A Women's Commentary. She recently completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives in St. John's on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she works as a poetry editor for Riddle Fence Magazine. Her special interests include collective liberation and wild swimming in all seasons.

April White makes art for exhausted people and wrestles with neoliberal capitalist ideals of success. April typically works with print media, sculpture, performance, drawing, or whatever medium that fits the current project. They hold a BFA from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of NL (2012) and spent much of their art career in St. John's, NL before moving to Montréal to pursue their MFA at Concordia University (2023). April is an award-winning artist whose work has exhibited extensively in the east coast of Canada.

Editorial Reviews

"Anna Swanson writes thrilling books, though The Garbage Poems isn't quite written, is it? Do I say rewritten by Swanson? Revised? Swanson's restraints thrill even a cynical heart. To compose with what doesn't decompose fast enough. To generate poems like mushrooms sprouting from trash. These wordy by-products capitalize on consumer waste. Swanson's recycling the language of garbage is queer genius. I loved this book." - Michael V. Smith

"Swanson pieces together joyful communal rituals by collaging together words from the garbage left behind at a pond's edge and discovered the following morning. This book fearlessly rides tides of climate grief, chronic pain, and depression as well as the ecstatic joy of jumping into a pond during the brief Newfoundland summer - the triumph of The Garbage Poems is how much nuance and truth the artists extract from refuse." - Eva Crocker

"The Garbage Poems is an intricate mixture of immersion research, meditation, ritual, intertextuality and a lyrical lifeline to our often strange and tangled humanity. Beer cans and candy wrappers become objects of transformation in Anna Swanson's deft hands. In these poems, she shows us the relationship between pollution and introspection, between our grief and our undeniable need for joy." - Amber Dawn

"Through the use of found materials and language, Swanson builds her collages as a sequence of lyric studies, connecting material to location, and articulating her short narratives with material she might otherwise have never used, providing the opportunity to disrupt and challenge her own natural rhythms to stretch her poem-muscles, and explore lyric possibility. There are stories she wishes to explore, to tell, and these challenges upon her writing help provide new ways of looking at what, and even who, might otherwise have been abandoned." - rob mclennan, The Woodlot

From the Publisher