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Elizabeth Sylvia

@esylviapoet.bsky.social

830 followers 730 following 980 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 · 8h

This lady?

Photo of agent Peggy Carter, Captain America’s girlfriend

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 4d

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 · 9d

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 · 9d

Jackass: The Movie goes to Washington

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes.bsky.social · 9d

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

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 10d

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

soft, black underbelly @upfromsumdirt.bsky.social · 11d

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 · 11d

Won’t eat seed oils but face 100% silicone

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 11d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

Jenn Martelli 💔

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

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 12d

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

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 12d

@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 · 14d

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 · 13d

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

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 13d

Can billionaires just not write books.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 14d

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 · 14d

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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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

Poets!

From A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE by Miriam Toews

Another parable: I he first time 1 was invited to visit another city as a writer, I was housed in the backyard shed of an associate professor at the university where I'd be reading. A different professor, a poet, who'd arranged this trip, was supposed to have picked me up at the train station and housed me. But she had fallen in love. Now she couldn't put me up at her place after all, because of falling in love, and she couldn't pick me up at the station either. Love is love. Poets! The other woman, the associate professor, showed me the shed and said she was sorry, but it was the best she could do. She had moved the garden tools and lawn mower and oily rags into one corner of the shed. "Please don't smoke." A blow-up mattress lay in the other corner, with an air pump beside it in case it deflated during the night, as it was prone to, and the professor had brought in a lamp for me to use but only after dark. If you need the washroom, she said, please come to the house but knock first. Her five-year-old daughter was having a birthday party, and the professor was concerned that I would frighten the children if I, a perfect stranger, a perfect smoking stranger, suddenly appeared in the house needing to urinate.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

I agree! But also think that reciprocal care comes in seasons, and it's my season for listening not talking. Except to my therapist, lol.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

I hope your problems won't break you, I hope you're not near that now or ever ❤️. I also don't think my Yankee-ness about this is even good! It just is. And right now, all my friends are just going through it.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

My therapist says I should talk to my friends about how I'm feeling and I'm like, my friends all have parents with dementia or terminally ill husbands or kids who are suicidal or are about to lose their careers to meat grinder of the Trump administration I am not about to make this about my feels.

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 15d

So grateful for this thoughtful review of MY LITTLE BOOK OF DOMESTIC ANXIETIES @merliterary.bsky.social, including an Anne Sexton reference.

merliterary.com/2025/09/17/m...

My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia - MER - Mom Egg Review

Review by Ruth Hoberman Elizabeth’s Sylvia’s new book presents itself modestly: My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties contains only twenty-four poems, and their tone (like the title) is low-key. But ...

merliterary.com

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Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 16d

My musician friend describes the business as: Your art is a loss leader for your brand. Merch is what keeps them going.

Elizabeth Sylvia @esylviapoet.bsky.social · 17d

Oh dear. Hopefully you can rest and read some of those books.

Reposted by Elizabeth Sylvia

SWWIM @swwim.bsky.social · 19d

Happy Weekend! Join us in celebrating this week's SWWIM #Shoutouts!

#SWWIMEveryDay #SWWIMWithUs #Poetry #ItsLit #WomenWriters #WomenPoets #WomenPublishingWomen #Ciswomen #TransWomen #Nonbinary #Intersex #GenderExpansive #Inclusive #Community #WeeklySpotlight #ShoutOuts

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