The Garbage Poems

BOOK: A collection of 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. These found(ish) poems are built out of text transcribed from garbage collected at some of my favourite swimming holes over the course of eight years. The book features full-colour illustrations by April White, and published in print and eBook by Brick Books (September, 2025).

WEBSITE: The Garbage Poems is also an interactive website! Scroll over individual words to discover which speicif item of garbage it came from. Or try your hand at making your own garbage poem! Designed by Matthew Hollett, with watercolour illustrations by April White.

“Swanson’s recycling the language of garbage is queer genius. I loved this book.”—Michael V. Smith

“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

“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

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 LAMDBA LITERARY AWARD FOR BISEXUAL POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BMO WINTERSET AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 PAT LOWTHER AWARD

“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

Get the book!

  • Find it at a local indie bookstore (click “shop local” and enter your postal code)
  • Or ask any indie bookseller to order it in for you!
  • Borrow from your local library or request they purchase it (I’m a librarian – this would make me very happy)
  • See this post for a list of indie bookstores across Canada who currently carry this book

Reviews

Read Excerpts Online

Articles/Interviews