The Garbage Poems,
Anna Swanson
Brick Books, 2025
As a fellow lake swimmer, it seems fitting that I must openly admit my bias for eagerly entering a wide variety of lakes and rivers in Northern Ontario each summer before I even begin to review Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems.
Swanson begins with recognizing the stress that climate crisis—and climate grief—can have on a person in the first poem in the book, “I Am Writing a Spell for Your Nervous System.” The spell is being hidden “in a poem.” All is made clear for the reader in the first few couplets of this piece. The speaker lists the things that cause them stress: “Another heatwave, hurricane. Grief//gurgles like a sump pump./The Arctic on fire. Thirsty birds//of industry, mouthing/dry wells” are noted, followed by “Bulldozers//in the olive grove. Prehensile/suits in a sealed building,//deciding who deserves/to be a person.” As Swanson writes later in the collection, in a section titled “Some Definitions,” a “spell” may be defined as “Poetry as incantation, as speech act, as linguistic battery, as asynchronous co-regulation, as jam jars put up for the long winter.” Here, the poet equates poetry with magic, alongside swimming and its transformative powers.
For the poet, the noise of the greedy corporate world causes nerves to be “clenched/shut like barnacles.” A road out of the city leads to a place to swim, where the speaker steps out “of the idea of clothes,//into a shallow dive.” The escape and respite of the pond swim means that they can enter the world again afterward, “begin again” in the face of a dark world.
What’s unique about The Garbage Poems is that all of them—except for three—are composed of found text. These are found poems that sing loudly, calling readers to pay attention to the poems themselves, but also inviting them to engage with April White’s beautiful illustrations. Each illustration is paired with a poem, and each poem reflects the piece of rubbish that is visible in White’s drawings. There’s a lovely balance here—of finding visual and poetic art in what has been cast off without thought near all the swimming spots that Swanson visits and records. The words—the poetry—come from the cast-off pieces of garbage. (Only the titles of the poems are not tied to refuse.) Even in times of climate crisis, making art is key and this art comes from what’s been trashed. This transformative creativity is part of what makes The Garbage Poems even more timely and powerful. It leaves readers thinking “How can we shift crisis into creativity?” and “How can we use art and poetry to remind us that we can’t give up?”
Throughout the collection, the natural elements consistently serve as doorways from one dimension into another. In “Portals,” the speaker informs the reader that there is “A hum at the edge//of a formal garden/that called to us, sparked” and that, in passing through it into parallel universes, they “dive towards the perfect//doorway of my outline,/the rippling of a beaded curtain//about to part.” In closing, the speaker says, “Now I surface, wet with crossing.” The more a swimmer enters water, is physically released from the confines of gravitational forces and can float freely and without tether, the clearer their voice seems to get.
In the poem, “In Which Skinny-Dipping Restores a Voice,” the speaker speaks to a swimmer who searches for something that cannot be found on land, where they can only find comfort in total submersion: “Make cold contact./Your face, your ribs. Your assembled//damage & cravings. Stay under./Lose your left & your right. Lose your receipts//& your schedules & your adhesive/outline.” Upon surfacing and taking a breath, the speaker encourages the swimmer to “Speak now like a child who is//also an alligator” while also speaking “the apples/of your green-bodied attention” and reminds them to “Speak hot & necessary like calories,//like antibodies./Like fire.” Through this earthy (and watery) baptism by means of swimming, the swimmer comes into themselves fully.
Physicality, chronic illness, and nervous system regulation are present in The Garbage Poems, too. Body-based reflections and observations are central to the poems. Concussions cause worry and the speaker finds comfort in swimming. In one of the “Some Definitions” sections that spread out in the book, nervous system regulation is reflected upon: “In the water, my nerves finally stop multi-tasking. None of them are afraid…Each nerve registers the same smooth touch of the water. They are in agreement. There is no chatter, no emergency council. Slowly, my nerves open like barnacles, reaching their slight sightless fronds out into the living water.” In “Nothing Is Wrong, I Tell Myself,” the speaker reflects on how a concussion has indirectly helped them see the world in a different way: “The mind’s door,//which opens and shuts/like a haunted memory game” is soothed by “walking the flooded lawn//back to the porch after an early swim/across the flooded lake.” The shift from what was into what is now is unsettling as we move through various stages of life, but a rallying call of “it me!” after a swim means that the swim through a nearby water body can pull us back to ourselves as we are.
In poems like “Night Swimming, Fall Equinox,” Swanson captures the fluidity of queer desire in the lines: “Remember/under that go-go moon//how we twisted/out of even our names?” and “we added//our daily recommended/allowance of heat to the still//water.” In “Can We Talk about Pleasure?”, the speaker says: “Yes//to pleasure, & yes again,/until we can splash//back into this at will, yes.” Desire is as fluid as the element of water, and this is reflected in the lines of poetry that slip through lakes, ponds, rivers, and language. The poet is a deft craftsperson, inviting the reader into the pieces to step outside of the contrived and constructed “bodies” and structures that humans are so often forced to fit into during their work lives.
What’s obvious in reading Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems is the amount of care and craft that has gone into creating these poems. A complementary “read” would be to visit Swanson’s website and explore the interactive page that shows the source of each word in each poem. What comes to mind after a close reading of this work is that the oppressive constructs of land-based living can be escaped through a swim, but there is also a reminder that when we return to shore, we need to attend to the state of what we’ve left behind. We must be able to consider how we deal with the rubbish that’s been thoughtlessly cast off and consider how best to mend and take better care of the environments within which we live, walk, and swim.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.
