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