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."