Thank you for pre-ordering my poetry collection,

The Garbage Poems!

OUT on SEPTEMBER 29, 2025

When I first started writing the poems in this book, I wondered if poetry could be a technology like canning and preserving, a way to bottle up some of the fat fruits of a short Newfoundland summer, particularly that felt-sense of electric calm embodiment I felt when swimming in my favourite ponds and rivers, and store that feeling away for the longest nights of winter when I might need it most. Over the last two years, I’ve gone back to school to do an MFA, and between personal health crises and the daily witnessing of ongoing genocide and rising fascism, these have been some of the most challenging years of my adult life. I’ve been trying to balance the needs of my chronically ill body and injured brain, with my desire to take action and resist the violent power systems that fuel genocide in Gaza, climate crisis, and rising fascism, while at the same time writing about those same violences for my MFA thesis. I’ve felt like I was never doing enough, and simultaneously that I was always in danger of pushing my already exhausted body to the breaking point. Throughout all of this, one ongoing thread of solace has been working with Brick Books on The Garbage Poems. I have sometimes worried that such a book about the small joys of swimming is unimportant or even embarrassing in the midst of such devastation on all sides. But there has been something transformative about watching a messy manuscript become a book – from the amazing illustrations, to the deep care of the editing process, to the thrilling cover and interior design, and right down to the hot pink bottle-cap end papers. Watching this team of talented people bring the book to life has made me see it in new ways, and has allowed present day me to be that person on that longest night opening up my own little jam jars, sent through to this uncertain future to remind me of how powerful embodied joy can be, how political, and how necessary. I read recently that fascism wants us overwhelmed, dysregulated, disembodied, and nihilistic, that fascism benefits from the states in which we are least likely to resist escalating violence and repression, least likely to believe another world is possible. Whatever your survival joy may be, whether it’s swimming or singing or dancing with your cat in the kitchen, whatever reminds you how to be alive to the world, I hope you reach out for it now.

Thank you to everyone who has already supported and pre-ordered this book through our earlier fundraising campaign. Because of you, we’ve been able to print it in full colour, and I can tell you that it’s going to be beautiful. Your orders will be in the mail as soon as books, pins, and prints are ready.

The video above was shot by April White, the illustrator for The Garbage Poems, during a residency at Halls Island. This is the closest thing I have to a visual record of what it feels like for my body to be held by a body of water. The Garbage Poems is my attempt in words.

Thank you for your support!

About The Garbage Poems

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 together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.

Praise for The Garbage Poems: 

“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

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.