Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to "our confusion, our curiosity." These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —"What we couldn't say we found in the skies." MacAskill's great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what "so quickly I /knew and knew and knew." (From Gaspereau Press)

MacAskill is the author of three previously published poetry collections, including Shadow Blight, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 2022. Her fiction has previously appeared in Canthius and Plenitude. MacAskill lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), in Mi'kma'ki, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq.

MacAskill was longlisted for the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize and more recently longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize.