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. "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
