“Maggie Burton’s Chores is charming and profound, traditional and inventive. Its combination of qualities seems effortless but is not only the innate fruit of a vision but the result of skillful poetic design. The book’s detailed, intimate awareness beautifully evokes Newfoundland and expands to our worldwide cultural moment. Burton applies a critique of how we live while embracing life with tenderness and humour.”
— Judges’ Citation, 2024 Canadian First Book Prize
From the opening poem “The Midwife” of Maggie Burton’s debut collection, Chores, to the last line of “Robin Soup”, prepare to be hooked. Burton doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of being a woman - or girlhood for that matter - in rural Newfoundland, both historically and today. Burton’s feminist poetry illustrates their perseverance and deep intimate kinships. Chores finds the poetic power in birth, midwifery, domestic life, gendered labour, family histories and queer desire. Burton’s poems blend humour, tradition, domestic tasks and sexuality to let readers know - the jig is up on the patriarchy.”
— Judges’ Citation, 2024 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Crackling with energy, Chores follows a rural Newfoundland girl through childhood, adolescence, and womanhood, exploring the suffering and pleasures that shape a life. Maggie Burton’s poems are accessible, precise, and full of imaginative force, highlighting sustaining work and granting the ordinary with agency: the speaker’s body morphs into a tub, pipes mutter, drains open into mouths. With slippery, surprising diction and an everynan presence, these poems transform domestic spaces into psychic terrain—linoleum becomes erotic, an overloaded freezer morphs into harbour ice in spring thaw, the draft beneath the kitchen sink carries both the stale air of bad dates and the fervent hum of queer desire. The collection culminates in its stark final command to the reader: Look / at yourself in the bottom of the bowl—look at your own volatile and beautiful life.— Jury Citation, 2025 NL Book Awards E. J. Pratt Family Poetry Prize