***2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Winner***

This semi-autobiographical collection of poetry offers an historical snapshot of domestic life that views women’s labour, relationships, and sexuality through a feminist lens.

Chores is about families and the domestic work of settler women on the island of Newfoundland. A comedy and a tragedy in equal parts, Chores explores everyday life with all its pleasures and suffering.

The simple, indirect, and accessible language of Chores creates vivid, recurring images of food, household objects, body parts, and animals. The poems scrutinize the physical and social details of domestic labour and of the conditions in which women did, and continue to do, the work of sustaining life.

Newfoundland poet Maggie Burton is a multi-genre writer, professional violinist, and municipal politician. Burton holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Memorial University and has spent much of her career teaching with the Suzuki Talent Education Program and playing with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra. Chores was awarded the 2024 Griffin Canadian First Book Prize, received a silver medal in poetry from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Burton’s poetry explores the social and physical realities surrounding women’s domestic labour, sexuality, and relationships through a queer, feminist, working class lens. Burton writes and lives on the Avalon Peninsula, where she is raising her four young children.

Maggie Burton's profile page

“Chores are universal. Unless one has a housekeeper or maid under their employ, it’s a necessary day-to-day grind. We all have to-do lists to tackle on a regular basis, just as our ancestors did, and theirs were even longer than ours. But as Maggie Burton proves through Chores, a tenacious attitude is what makes the difference between a home well-maintained, and a home only reluctantly maintained. There is beauty and meaning to be found in chores if one simply wipes the sweat away from one’s forehead and peers closer. Past the dust and grime and potato peelings and breadcrumbs, there is history.”

Atlantic Books Today

“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. For all the fate, traditional limitation, labour, bitter recognition that chores contain, perhaps the deepest desire of Chores is to fulfill its glimpses of hope beyond mere acceptance: “the old harbour was chock solid with seals // and harpoons and I now believe / with all my heart the stirring is true…”

Canadian First Book Prize Judges Albert F. Moritz, Jan Wagner, and Anne Waldman