Cover Reveal: Scythe by Elizabeth Sylvia

Author

Han VanderHart
January 09, 2026

Scythe, cover design by Alban Fischer

A warm welcome to Elizabeth Sylvia’s second full-length poetry collection SCYTHE and its beautiful cover, featuring Marie Antoinette! Please find the collection’s opening poem “Invitation to Marie Antoinette” and blurbs from Kathryn Nuernberger, Sara Moore Wagner, and Andrew Hemmert below. Preorders for Scythe are now open in our online bookshop.

More about Scythe: 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

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“There is much damage in cake, / ambrosial and tender in my mouth.”

Elizabeth Sylvia

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.

INVITATION TO MARIE ANTOINETTE Walk once again around the yard with me, before the autumn's early frost pulls down my garden's ornaments. Though we've both known the little darks of sleep, I'm not ready for forever or thereafter. I've heard you grew religious once this bloody world had shaken heel of you but I am still devoted to the grass beneath our feet, to heirloom chickens, honeybees, the wall of pines that shields me from society. Will I linger in some future person's past the way that you persist in mine! See that mantis on the seed-head's golden throne-she too readies for the end of times.

Preorder Scythe today, and support small press publishing while you do. River River was founded by Amorak Huey and Han VanderHart in March 2022 at AWP Philly in the hopes of championing poetry that moves. River River—where you never step in the same book twice.

Happy reading, and thanks for your support,

Han & Amorak