The paper focuses on the ways in which contemporary poetry of northern Sweden may voice issues of materiality in a postcolonial context. The study aims to explore the unstable boundaries between human and nonhuman, between garbage and commodity, and between the local and the global. The poetry is read in the historical light of a specific literary tradition emanating from the northern part of Sweden, where the landscape is configured by the two predominant depictions of it in 20th century literature: the exotic wilderness and the early industrial exploitation of this wilderness; the former being conceived as a utopian image and the latter as a dystopian vision. The paper thus addresses questions concerning the possibilities of reading young contemporary poetry in the context of the traditional literature of northern Sweden in a postcolonial perspective.