The Garbage Poems

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.

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.