The Garbage Poems

FINALIST FOR THE LAMDBA LITERARY AWARD FOR BISEXUAL POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BMO WINTERSET AWARD

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.