Scythe

by Elizabeth Sylvia

106 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2026

Reviews

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about Marie Antoinette (placed in today's time, with the poet), climate change, motherhood, survival, and hope.

from Invitation to Marie Antoinette: "Will I linger in some future person's / past the way you persist in mine? / See that mantis on the seed head's golden / throne? She too readies for the end of times."

from Eggs: "Will I die sitting on the porch / with a revolver, scaring folks out of my chicken coop? If i / read the news too much, it seems a likely way to go / and if Marie had pictured M. Guillotin's precipitous device, / perhaps she would have never left for France. / But maybe she'd go on the same, resplendent / in her jewels and gowns, committed to the final dance."

from PSL: "Marie's delighted / everyone loves pumpkin spice. // She's sympathetic to a basic bitch, soft / to the marketplace's buyable delights. When fall // skitters with bad ghosts, sugar's a sweet antidote / for how the turning world keeps shortening her days."

[Katie Kemple · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Sylvia's new collection, SCYTHE, gives us meadows thick in black-eyed Susans, aster and goldenrod; a ravishing Marie Antoinette with her iconic pouf; and the speaker (our contemporary) in her Massachusetts garden contemplating life, beauty, and the Anthropocene. These highly crafted poems ask what we owe our environment, our children, and nature -- as fewer Monarch butterflies complete their journey south, temperatures rise, and neighbors build water towers to hedge against a future of drought and fire. Marie Antoinette reminds us to find joy: scroll Pinterest, skip the news, devour strawberries in the backyard. We can't escape the inevitable, no matter how much we recycle. We know Marie's fate. Sylvia gives us hope at the end, "I know this is a world worth saving." This is a delightful read and a thoughtful contemplation on nature, humanity, and survival.

[Ann Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Sylvia’s poetry collection Scythe is simultaneously sharp-witted and heartbreaking. Confronting environmental crisis through an exploration into the life of Marie Antoinette, Sylvia imagines the excesses of the doomed queen with a deft touch of sympathy. After all, there are uncomfortable parallels between the ways in which Marie Antoinette inhabited the world and the ways that we carelessly careen toward disaster today.