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Elizabeth Sylvia

@esylviapoet.bsky.social

830 followers 740 following 990 posts

Poet, teacher, Massachusetts Class D Driver. SCYTHE (River River Books, 2026), MY LITTLE BOOK OF DOMESTIC ANXIETIES (Ballerini Books, 2025), NONE BUT WITCHES (3MH Press Book Award, 2022) elizabethsylviapoet.net

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · Dec 19

I am beyond thrilled to be joining the amazing authors at @riverriverbooks.bsky.social , and I can't say enough about @hanvanderhart.bsky.social and @amorak.bsky.social 's wisdom and generosity.

River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · Dec 19

Midwinter new includes—WELCOME, Elizabeth Sylvia and Zöe Ryder White to River River Books! 🎉🎉🎉

Sylvia’s Scythe and White’s The Visible Field will be published in early 2026–read more about both manuscripts and poets in the image and alt text below. Congratulations!

Spring 2026

Scythe limns the verdant space of the cultivated garden (from Versailles to Massachusetts), the reality of rising environmental heat, and the cost of human flourishing. Alongside Marie Antoinette and the bees, the speaker engages French colonialism, the extractive sugarcane trade, and the language of flight and escape-who can fly, and who can escape.

Bio: 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 forthcoming from Ballerini Press.

The Visible Field
The poems in White's debut collection live in the space between the mind's internal life and the body's external world. Meditative and expansive, quiet and joyous, these poems listen and look past the surface of things. Pay attention, they urge, and we do.

Bio: Zoë Ryder White (she/her) has had poems appearing in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press' Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors' choice pick for the Verse Tomaz Salamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Another collaboration with Nicole, Elsewhere, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 17h

I'll grant you bulletin board, but the town square is where you go to air all your public grievances in raucous debate. Old good Twitter was the town square.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 1d

I am way too much of a Yankee to spontaneously dm someone...like why don't I just walk in your kitchen without knocking.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 1d

I guess so, but nobody really talks over there? It’s like a middle school church basement dance.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 1d

Oh my gosh, of course you didn’t! I just respect your feedback and I do want to do my best by my work and RR ❤️

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 1d

I hate instagram so much 😭 but Han said I should go there.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 2d

I continue researching How To Be A Female Artist even though the answer remains Be Rich Or Marry Well

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 2d

Sorry for your loss ❤️

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 3d

Is it ethical to be a frog when the snow is on the ground?

Subpress Poetry @subpresspoetry.bsky.social · 3d

“Ethics” by Kyla Houbolt, from her forthcoming book, *Becoming Altar* asterismbooks.com/product/beco... @luaz.bsky.social

Ethics

Is it ethical to be a frog when the snow is on the ground? To be a frog in winter, in a sound mind and body of amphibious elegance? It isn't right! sing the bugs in their dens, we never got a chance to have amphibious elegance, we only got chitinous chic which is far far less groovy. The bugs grouse among themselves, crowding the rotting tree trunks, clicking and whirring and taking committee votes. But the unconcerned frog, who is not hungry for bug at the moment, casts no stones. There is no call to fiddle with all them bugs! thinks the frog to itself, preening in its winter mudhole. Meanwhile, Creator, in the form of Raven, listens in with amusement. None of these creatures knows what's to come, or how blessed their lives are. Though that smug frog might need to be taken down a peg or two, he thinks. Maybe it's time to send in the crows. And of course the poets are listening to all this, and each one is writing notes, and all the notes are different. This is the blessing and the curse of poetry: that it never agrees and that it never agrees. Ethics? Maybe in the spaces between.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 6d

This lady?

Photo of agent Peggy Carter, Captain America’s girlfriend

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 10d

I've started doing pleasure reading for 10-15 minutes a class with my sophomores. When I say it's reading time, their books are out in >1 minute and the classroom is dead silent.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

Every time I see the VSC residencies open I look at the applications and then I remember that they're $2700 and I could go to Paris for two weeks for that.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

Jackass: The Movie goes to Washington

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes.bsky.social · 16d

Pete Hegseth accidentally flipping a skateboard into his nuts on live TV

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 16d

The Shore @theshorepoetry.bsky.social · May 20

Susan L Leary "On Sundays, I Do Laundry" — THE SHORE www.theshorepoetry.org/susan-l-lear...

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sylvia

graveyard dirt @upfromsumdirt.bsky.social · 18d

author copies have arrived; hardback on the left and paperback on the right...

and im not any good for the rest of the day.

photo of 2 stacks of dark blue poetry books of the same title, the shoes of the Fisherman's Wife. the left stack is two hardcover and the right stack is 5 paperbacks.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 17d

Won’t eat seed oils but face 100% silicone

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 18d

Love a good remix

Like when the solo-cup in chain link “No King But Christ” became “King Buttchrist”

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sylvia

SWWIM @swwim.bsky.social · 18d

It is with great sadness that we mourn the loss of Jenn Martelli. She was a wonderful poet, colleague, collaborator, and friend to all. Her light will be dearly missed.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 19d

Jenn was a gifted writer and she was so generous to other writers—to me, in specific and special ways. I'll miss her voice.

Lesley Wheeler @lesleymwheeler.bsky.social · 19d

I love Jenn Martelli’s fierce and lovely poetry so much, and she was such a generous person. Miss you already, Jenn.

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) @dustinbrookshire.bsky.social · 19d

Jenn Martelli 💔

newohioreview.org/2024/03/29/t...

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 19d

No no no. I just emailed with her last week. I thought she was doing better. I am heartbroken.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 19d

@notatawp.bsky.social should have a little sister called NOMFA, who wants to play with the big kids but gets brushed off all the time 😜

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sylvia

Nate @nfako.bsky.social · 21d

Just finished this book and. Wow. @riverriverbooks.bsky.social The way the poems shift their language in a parallel gesture to the ever changing photographs. So good!

A photo of the cover of Field Notes by E.G. Cunningham. The cover shows a vast hazel field with gray sky above.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 20d

Supposedly material goods don’t bring happiness but the little electric teapot I bought for my classroom says otherwise.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 20d

Can billionaires just not write books.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 20d

My first Best of the Net nomination, thanks to @thedodgemag.bsky.social

Field Pansy
My nectar wooed the laden bees tumbling
in the grass,

flagrant below the sun, every pistil
shuddering

as their busy legs brushed me with
fertile news

Now there is less in the air,
less show,

less reaching towards the other
So be it

Bunkered, self-contained, fed
rations

of the known, resilience burrows
each looped

gene, makes my descendants
pale duplicates

Hoarding and blameless, I drop
little pollen

in the world’s begging cup,
against present

and expected loss, unfold scant
shrunken blooms

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sylvia

Copper Canyon Press @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social · 20d

Tonight's the night! 🌟 Please join us in cheering on our very own NATALIE SHAPERO as she competes on Jeopardy!

Visit jeopardy.com/watch to find your local channel or stream the full episode starting tomorrow on Hulu.

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