Poetry is not often celebrated for its literal use of language, but there is a charming literality to the title of Anna Swanson’s second volume of poetry. The Garbage Poems is a collection built by the Gerald Lampert Award and Lambda Literary Award–winning poet, for the most part, from the language lifted from garbage she found and collected at swimming holes across the country over a number of years. 

Most of the poems in the collection are divided into six sections, each named for the geographical location where the litter that Swanson pilfered for its syllables was found. These garbage poems, which Swanson notes are composed – with the exception of their titles – of words found on discarded items, are placed into wider context by intervening poems not built from the language of disposable packaging. These poems are generally longer than the garbage poems, and often more keenly personal and narrative in nature. In one, “Nothing Is Wrong, I Tell Myself,” Swanson describes a scene of her life after suffering a concussion, in which she references her newfound method of writing: “What’s the word is how I find myself / here, at this pile of empty bottles / and candy wrappers, settling for recognition, / not creation.” Her return to poetry is not easy: “Even speaking as the I in I Spy / is hard these days,” she notes. “Before my own faltering I had no need / of this slapdash muckery.”

In a series of changing prose definitions that intersperse the sections of verse – each called “some definitions” – Swanson interrogates the easy literality of the collection’s title. What is garbage? And how do we define trash, really? Or litter? The answers to these questions, and to other, more complicated ones about how chronic illness impacts the body, and how the human body interacts with its surroundings, are less literal and more changeable, just as the “brash borrowed imperative / and fact-proof superlative” of advertising copy takes on greater meaning in Swanson’s capable poetic hands. 

The poems themselves deal with Swanson’s chronic illness and recovery from the concussion. They are about cold-water swimming and finding one’s voice and the creative struggle. Swanson takes words such as aspartame – used on sugar-free gum packaging and not obviously considered the stuff of poetry – and transforms them into the profound, as in “In Which Skinny-Dipping Restores a Voice”:

You have come to speak one-on-one
with the world. Not danger exactly,

just that your fire has become harmless,
your hope tastes like aspartame

& your thirst cannot remember
what it wants.

The book is illustrated with full-colour watercolour portraits of the pieces of trash that gave Swanson the words to find her way back to creating. Painted by artist April White, the litter portraits, too, take the literal and transform it. Under White’s brush, crumpled pieces of garbage found on the rocks beside lakes, rivers, and oceans are transformed into things of beauty, just as the words in the marketing copy that adorn them are transformed by Swanson’s pen into polished gems of free verse.

April White

The Garbage Poems is an autobiographical collection located by its physical source material in a specific time and specific places, and during a particular stage of Swanson’s life. But its power lies in Swanson’s ability to rebuild the scraps of language found on refuse into a well-considered, intricately built collection of substance. These are serious poems about much more than their origins in detritus imply.