Elizabeth Sylvia's second poetry collection Scythe limns the verdant space of the cultivated garden—from Versailles to Massachusetts—while keenly tracing the reality of rising environmental heat and the cost of human flourishing. Alongside the comic-tragic figure of Marie Antoinette and the sugar-seeking bees, the speaker engages French colonialism, the extractive sugarcane trade, gendered labor, and the language of flight and escape—asking who can fly, and who can escape. A deeply and greenly, tender collection, rife with the acknowledgement that "There is much damage in cake, / ambrosial and tender in my mouth."
Elizabeth Sylvia was raised on Martha's Vineyard and still lives in coastal Massachusetts. She is the author of None But Witches (2022), winner of the 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award, and the chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties (Ballerini Books, 2025), a finalist for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. The daughter of an avowed Francophile, she lived in France as a young woman and continues to visit regularly.
"'Why would any of us refuse what we desire now?' asks Marie Antoinette of the speaker of Scythe. In this sharp book of poems by Elizabeth Sylvia, we walk unsteady through the twin fallen kingdoms of the interior and the exterior, with Marie Antoinette as our Virgil. There is compelling conflict in this book between the desire to live fully and experience the whole world, and the desire to preserve said world by extricating ourselves from it. So we look seriously, gravely, at motherhood and dwindling butterflies, at pyrocumulus clouds from wildfires, at the expensive dogs we buy in order to love them. We wonder how actually one praises a world in line for the guillotine, and arrive at no easy answers. But I do love the answer Sylvia's speaker gives: 'I am still devoted to the grass beneath our feet.'" — Andrew Hemmert, author of No Longer at This Address
"In our contemporary neo-liberal world order, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine beyond a relentless and reckless complicity. But seeing through the tacky gilding is a first step. Enter Elizabeth Sylvia's Scythe, a remarkable poetry collection about Marie Antoinette and her legacy that considers with refreshing honesty and insight what it costs to live at the heart of an empire and feast on its spoils." — Kathryn Nuernberger, author of HELD: Essays in Belonging
"The best historical poetry is also timely; it moves beyond the subject into the symbolic. Elizabeth Sylvia does this and more. In Scythe, Marie Antoinette steps out of time. As readers, we experience the last Queen of France's voice through expertly crafted persona and surprising contemporary turns and musings. We walk with her through a modern garden. Marie even watches Real Housewives. Sylvia's brilliant juxtaposition of the past and present reflects the darker realities of modern comfort, of clinging to the belief that, 'history happens far' away. It is about our own opulence and excess, how we are 'wild-eyed to keep it.' Scythe is historical poetry, but it is also a personal and ecopoetical cry to not let the 'finite goods of this jeweled planet [run] / through our fingers.' In this hall of mirrors, Sylvia asks us to confront how like Marie Antoinette we all are. How much worse." — Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot
