Five Questions with author Elizabeth Sylvia

Hello, River River readers! It’s such a pleasure today to present our Five Questions author interview with poet Elizabeth Sylvia, whose second full-length collection, Scythe, published February 23, 2026.

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How does the idea of place, something we love at River River Books, shape Scythe?

A trio of places—Massachusetts, Guadeloupe, and Mary Antoinette’s farm at Versailles—anchor the poems in this collection. These are all places of intense personal meaning to me, although I don’t directly express their biographical significance in the book. I was raised and have lived most of my adult life in Massachusetts; its cultural preoccupations with silence and labor continue to shape me in ways I don’t fully recognize. Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island colonized and absorbed into the French state, has been my family’s most regular vacation destination for the last ten years, and I speak French largely because of my father’s love for the culture and landscapes; we visited often during my childhood. Another ghost: during my preschool years in the late 1970s, my parents taught in recently-liberated Algeria. I first spoke French in Algeria, and so I owe my linguistic facility (such as it is) directly to the echo of France’s colonialism.

I’m also interested in the relationship between the social world and the natural one.

During the pandemic “nature” assumed an idealized, expanded value. When we couldn’t go anywhere, “nature” let us leave the house, and article after article extolled its benefits on our distressed psyches. I understood! I agreed! I walked through the woods behind my house and spent hours working in my garden. In truth, the early pandemic was a beautiful time of retreat and wholeness for my family because we had the economic privilege to make it so. Still, I couldn’t miss how different my experience was from that of many people for whom the pandemic was a time of harrowing fear, illness and insecurity often magnified by economic precarity. Media pronouncements on self-care elided these folks entirely, when it was obvious they bore the strain of the pandemic much more than the average work-at-home suburbanite. (Sidenote: I hate the concept of self-care. How about some systems of care, mfers?) Pandemic restrictions did not create the connection between money, respite, and the outdoors (hullo, Land Rovers), but they bolded the map lines around who nature gets to be for.

Finally, as a New Englander raised in the tradition of Thoreau, I’ve been trained to see the natural world as an opposite of society and a refuge from it, a source of knowledge about the self. Writing this book showed me how limited that idea is. Everything I think of as “nature” is profoundly shaped by humans. The “woods” behind my house weren’t woods 100 years ago. They were fields, and before they were fields, they were shaped by native plantings and footpaths, by underbrush clearing and contests over territory. This land hasn’t been a wilderness for probably 1,000 years. When I think about this place, this place I truly love and feel made by, everything I know is the handprint of people on the land. And the handprint of people on the land is always a greater or lesser violence. As a white American, even one whose roots don’t extend back very far, that violence is fundamentally a colonizing violence. And the garden, for me, is a metaphor for that. Through writing this book, I’ve come to see the garden as a space of violence disguised as care. But I still love to garden. So it’s complicated.

What is a poem that you see as a particular driving force in your collection, and why?

“Cloister,” as “Ars Antoinettica,” was the collection’s title poem for most of its development. That poem brings together the collection’s themes of seclusion, protection, privilege and precariousness, but also most clearly embeds myself inside the Marie figure, rather than representing her solely as a complicated caricature of privileged America.

What was a significant revision that occurred along the way?

Early versions of the book contained two segmented longer poems. The first was a snarky series of shorts in which Marie expressed amusement or disregard for my consumer anxiety. The second was a long prose poem that braided Marie’s historical escape attempt, my family’s history of vacationing in Guadeloupe, and the precarity of some endangered species. One was a bit too light and the other was way too heavy. I broke the first apart and interspersed the short poems through the text as little palate cleansers. I broke up the parts of the second poem that focused on Guadeloupe and the animals, again placing them throughout the book as a recurring idea rather than a climactic one. Finally, I transformed the narrative of Marie’s escape attempt into a persona poem, separating it completely from the original text and aligning it with the other poems in the second section where Marie is allowed to express her vulnerability and circumscription.

I moved slowly towards a more unified collection by letting go of poems that interested me but digressed from the central themes of the collection without circling back in. I think it’s really hard to structure a collection to retain coherence without becoming redundant. I’m still sad about cutting the e.coli megaplate poem though.

At what stage did your final title emerge—early, late? How did it help with your collection’s conception?

You two picked the title, a revelation to me that works across multiple planes in the text, perhaps gesturing towards the guillotine that claimed Marie Antoinette and the Grim Reaper’s blade, but also embodying human subordination of nature and the eternal maxim that We reap what we sow—in this case, the devastation wrought by our excessive, extractive lives.

What’s something you wish every reader could know about you as the writer of Scythe?

That I actually live a very modest life! ... and still consume far too much.

Elizabeth Sylvia’s first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semifinalist or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. She has received fellowships from the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. Her chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties is available from Ballerini Press.

River River has seven books coming in February 2026!
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