Mary Dalton
“How exciting to hear an entirely new voice in Newfoundland poetry. The world of Maggie Burton's Chores is charged with blood, threat, danger. In these poems there's a sense of the primordial found in Grimm's fairy tales, allied with the angst of a contemporary young woman. Burton heightens the mundane, intensifies the domestic, creating in language something akin to what Mary Pratt has done in her paintings of gutted moose and fish, broken eggs, pomegranates. In so doing she gives us compelling psychic portraits, of a rural Newfoundland girlhood and of the trauma of a broken relationship—each reflecting nature as red in tooth and claw.”
Author of The Nights Also - Anna Swanson
“When we hear the word 'chores' most of us aren't imagining something this riveting or visceral. These poems are grounded in an everyday knowledge that doesn't shy away from the blood of birthing or cleaning fish or skinning rabbits in the sink. With careful attention, quiet horror, humour, and a streak of frank sexuality, Maggie Burton takes an unflinching look at gendered labour, family histories, tradition, and queer desire, all through the intimate lens of domestic tasks.”
Megan Gail Coles
“Maggie Burton's debut collection of poems bares the fragile reality of our collectively borne rough care while remaining resolutely honest and steadfast in its undressing. In carefully chosen moments and undervalued gestures, captured and returned to the reader, Burton pays homage to the bodily cost of coping, the ordinary self-deception required to continue and the burden of love felt amongst a people drawn and quartered upon limitations, tradition and humour. It is in our chores, each act of service a declaration of devotion and obligation, that we find the breadth of ourselves, our mutual need and necessary capacity for living.”
