Life, like much else, is what it is, as they say, and having done what they were told, having had (mostly) made the “correct” choices as regards love, careers, friendships, etc., and having pursued the modest dreams they thought they wanted, Burton’s characters come to find not the elusive quality of happiness, nor fulfillment, nor even contentedness with themselves, their lives, and their partners, but only more of the same resentment, drudgery, and disappointment they once maybe thought they were leaving behind. An emptiness so deep and vast it can never be filled, no matter who you’re fucking, with no idea in particular where this emptiness comes from and with only fleeting—as the collection’s title suggests—moments of peace and self-acceptance.

You can practice all the ethical non-monogamy you like, Instagram yourself to death, virtue-signal until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately, Burton seems to suggest, not only is Hell other people, but Hell is also, perhaps felt most acutely of all, oneself. And there’s no escaping that. But maybe there is the possibility of changing it.

As heavy as all that sounds, Burton’s prose is light and quick enough to bear the weight—the collection is infused with an understated humour—and there’s a certain train-wreck fascination, not to mention, dare I say it, unsettling recognition of oneself, in watching her characters careen from one emotional pile-up to the next. Whether it’s Sheryl in “Location Sharing,” the collection’s opening story, whose attempts to keep her partner under Panopticon-level surveillance ultimately (and predictably) alienates him, to Casey, in “Cards,” who kisses her septuagenarian neighbour Heidi in a moment of earnest yet nebulously defined yearning, there is a tension throughout A Temporary Grace between expansive curiosity and claustrophobic fear. A pushing against definitional boundaries around sex and love and intimacy, even as those same boundaries would seem to offer safety and emotional security, limiting as they can inevitably become.  

And this tension finds its most clear iteration in “Theatre,” the collection’s final story, in which Helen and Em are on a date that Em’s husband has more or less arranged. “Don’t you care about your freedom?” Helen asks, but Em’s answer amounts to an equivocation, an acknowledgement of the grip of patriarchal rules, even, or especially, in the face of her own performativity. “Of course I care,” she says, as the show they’re attending is about to begin. “I also care about my marriage.” To her credit, Burton has Helen leave Em and the big performance behind, leaving the reader to wonder about the degree to which this scene operates as a commentary on this story and the collection as a whole, and moreover—in this age of public myth-making, of curated identity—the notion of self-discovery itself. 

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). Total Party Kill, his collection of poetry exploring addiction and sobriety through the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons, was published by Breakwater Books in 2024.