The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson

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

Jury Citations

“Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems, alight with April White’s irresistible illustrations, is a gorgeous, unflinching collection as big-hearted as the lakes, rivers, and ponds from which it recovers human joy and grief. Here poetry is ‘queer candy / in the underwater light,’ and litter glitters into archives of desire. From under the wreckage of colonial capital and its cruel machinery of disposability, delicious prayer surfaces. Swanson’s watery yet precise language resuscitates a wonder for life she nudges us not to give up searching for.”—from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award

Reviews of The Garbage Poems

“The Garbage Poems is an autobiographical collection located by its physical source material in a specific time and specific places, and during a particular stage of Swanson’s life. But its power lies in Swanson’s ability to rebuild the scraps of language found on refuse into a well-considered, intricately built collection of substance. These are serious poems about much more than their origins in detritus imply.”—Cassandra Drudi, Quill & Quire

“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