Chores

by Maggie Burton

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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 30, 2023

Reviews

[Alice Ferguson-O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Chores felt like going home in all the best and worst ways. The environment is blended into her writing in such a seamless way; her imagery blends with storytelling and I felt so immersed in her worlds without even really realizing it. I loved ii. Mackerel Scales and the Bingo series. Thank you Matilda for the recommendation. Thank you Maggie for your poetry!

[Beth Bowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The content and style that Burton writes is achingly familiar. From one small-town bay-girl to another, this felt like a letter from home.

[Emily Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A commanding debut of poems which look and listen closely in a way reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. We see eye-level with the narrator-as-child, examining the grandmother’s cooking pot or spider veins, the Bingo hall floor where the narrator forages “for change scooping FREE pennies dimes/stuffing them in my khaki green fanny pack.” The verse is tight, rhythmic, touching, entertaining and comic. These poems examine female bodies growing, aging, developing desire for other female bodies and critiquing traditional domestic labour in a way which both honours and condemns. This dual perspective is what the best books produce. As we journey through the narrator’s life, the act of doing chores stands for so much more. Cleaning out the freezer represents stagnation after winter, when sealers hunted through fog, and the disappointments of life when female “frugality” and “self-preservation” boils down to “box-mix pancakes” frozen for later. Vacuuming represents the triumphs and pitfalls of life: “I toppled towers of ash, grieving/for their shapes, their falls from grace”. The narrator questions: “How could I have emptied it,/knowing what I know?” Indeed, how do we inhabit or distance ourselves from our upbringing? As the narrator becomes a woman and owns chores, she does not bleach or dump out the matrilineal burdens she has inherited, but preserves humble voices within honed art.

[Stephanie Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
I’ll admit, I don’t typically read a lot of poetry. That being said, something about this book (maybe the dead fish on the cover) caught my attention and I had to give it a try. I’m glad I did. It’s not something I would usually go for, but I liked the concept of poems about domestic labour and the woman’s place in the home. Plus, the way Burton played with form - especially in the BINGO style poem - added another layer to the overall collection.

[Dorothy Mahoney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection that captures the atmosphere of chores done in rural households from Nan skinning a rabbit to the midwife unknowingly throwing out a twin with the placenta. "Doing the Dishes", "Cleaning out the Sock Drawer" and "Cleaning out the Freezer"... there's a lot of cleaning. More fun is
the poem, "Bingo" which is set up typographically as a bingo card with FREE in the middle under the
Letter N.

[brad mercer · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, thoughtful, personal yet relatable.

[Vivian Bender · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan of her writing style, under-uses all sorts of literary devices which I love and way over-uses enjambment.

[claude · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars
“bingo” and “clay pipes” were my favourites of the collection