The Garbage Poems
by Anna Swanson, April White
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 29 2025 | Archive Date Aug 31 2025
Literary Press Group of Canada | Brick Books
Talking about this book? Use #TheGarbagePoems #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Featured on CBC Newfoundland Morning with Leigh Anne Power
"This book will appeal to queer folks, disabled folks, art lovers, lovers of justice, Newfoundlanders, wild swimmers.
The audience for this book may be a little wider than for your average book of poetry because of the artwork in it, and because of the unique concept behind the composition of the poems.
The colour images will make for a beautiful gift book.
Good for anyone trying to find joy, calm their nervous system, and feel alive while the world is on fire.
Advance Praise
"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
Marketing Plan
Author launch in St John's NL, touring in Toronto, Guelph, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax where the author has communities
We are pitching widely to festivals, especially those on the east coast (as part of our 50th anniversary activities).
Tipsheets, press releases, and review copies sent widely
Ads in library and educational catalogues and as part of our 50th anniversary co-ops
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781771316613 |
| PRICE | CA$24.95 (CAD) |
| PAGES | 144 |
