Praise what steeps open the slow seed / or washes away with wild currents
Poetry | Excerpt | Anna Swanson | Issue 48
Excerpt from The Garbage Poems
Twist This Lifted Lexicon
out from under licenses & trademarks. Abandon the shareholders. Bye-bye. F off sponsors, surveillance, all that better, best, betcha. Choicest words—you little speak-weasels bursting with buzz & beaucoup. Wanting to want, for once, what is worth wanting. Dial up the oysters on ice, the dark saltlick of stars, your hot spite, your too much, your splash, your more more more. Bring that whole inflatable pharmacy of bafflement. Whose page? Your page. Whose story? Whose truthful smoking core?
Note: All words, except title, transcribed from garbage collected at Punch Bowl Pond.
Mikveh: Blessing for Immersion in Living Waters
Praise what steeps open the slow seed or washes away with wild currents or wears through rock. Praise fresh & salt. We come—holes in socks & our sincerely bad hair—to your seas, springs, daylighting streams. We stand salt-skinned & on our last larynx, dry as sponges before your many, your still, your crash, your whole & wonderful wet. Close again over our skin—please! praise! help!—you life-waters you fat fountains you cold tumble. Hold us while we attend to transformations wet & small. Rinse these secrets in our hands like sweet pears.
Note: All words, except title, transcribed from garbage collected at a swimming hole in Flatrock, NL.
April and I Take the Underwater Camera Swimming On the Last Weekend of Summer
In this dim underworld, liquid embers free-form on our frames, dressing us as if we could, this easily, be loved. Fibres of afterlight— are we recording?—taste us like snacks. I am delicious, we are delicious. Bare confectionary. We breathe & our air is uncanny, mirrored beans that pull, swell, silver the water around us. Here, in the messy bed of these light lines, in this far- flung signature of the sun, we unwind on record, slower, slower—are you getting this?—like a change coming due.
Note: All words, except title, transcribed from garbage collected at Beachy Cove, NL.
Poems and illustrations excerpted from The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson with illustrations by April White © 2025. Printed with permission of Brick Books.
Anna Swanson (she/her) is a queer writer and librarian. The Garbage Poems (Brick Books, 2025) is her second collection of poetry. Her first book, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010), won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has been widely published in journals and appears in anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry, Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, and Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She recently completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives in St. John’s on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she works as a poetry editor for Riddle Fence Magazine. Her special interests include collective liberation and wild swimming in all seasons.
April White makes art for tired people who struggle to exist in neoliberal capitalist society. April typically works with print media, watercolour, drawing, textiles, and performance. They hold a BFA from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador (2012) and an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2023). April is an award-winning artist whose work has exhibited extensively in the east coast of Canada. April loves tacos, cats, and wild swimming.
The Garbage Poems (Brick Books, Sept 29 2025) By Anna Swanson Illustrations by April White
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.
Send your love to Send My Love to Anyone!
Connect
Bluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA