When Mattapoisett’s Elizabeth Sylvia wrote her first poem at the age of 15, she could not have imagined that she would someday be a published author with a nationwide audience of readers and admirers.
But as her inspirations increased and evolved, so too did her accolades. Today, Sylvia is the recipient of extensive critical acclaim and boasts a resume that includes more than 60 published poems and three books of poems.
This past February, she released her latest book, “Scythe,” a collection of 51 poems that fuses her passion for gardening with her fascination for the historic French queen of the 18th century, Marie Antoinette. But “Scythe” isn’t just about gardening and history. It is another of Sylvia’s books that is devoted to the experiences of womanhood, told in Sylvia’s proven approach of humor, lyricism, and rich language.
Sylvia’s myriad writing accomplishments include the 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award in 2021, a fellowship from the New York Public Library in 2025, and the riverSedge Poetry Prize in 2023. She was named a Poetry Fellow with the Longleaf Writers Conference in 2024.
Sylvia’s first book of poems, “None But Witches,” was published in 2022 and is based on female characters in the plays of William Shakespeare. The book was a bestseller in the small press industry, and has sold more than 400 copies, a notable accomplishment in the poetry world for a first book. Her second book, a chapbook titled “My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties,” was published in 2025. In addition to her writing, she also reviews poetry for multiple magazines.
The release of “Scythe” will be celebrated on Sunday, April 12 with an event at Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth at 6 p.m. Born and raised in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Sylvia’s parents were both teachers. She has been a high school English teacher since 2000 and currently teaches at Bourne High School. She lives in Mattapoisett with her husband and two daughters.
Sylvia spoke to The Light about getting started, finding and working with a publisher, and her interests in Marie Antoinette, France, gardening, and the influence of Shakespeare.
New Bedford Light: How did you first become interested in poetry? What attracted you to it?
Elizabeth Sylvia: I’ve been interested in poetry since I was a teenager. I’m a Gen X-er, so like a lot of Gen X women I really loved Sylvia Plath.
As I got older and I became an English teacher, poetry was part of what I was teaching. After I had my first daughter I wanted to do something creative and I found that poems were great because a poem could be fit into a small amount of time.
You can work on one poem at a time. You can carry a poem around in your mind when you don’t have time to sit down and write it out. I have been writing poetry consistently ever since my daughters were young.
In 2015, I was invited to join the Mattapoisett Poets group. The poets in that group improved my writing and encouraged me to try publishing my work. I wouldn’t be where I am now without them, especially Susan Pizzolato, Vivian Eyre, and Margot Wizansky.
NBL: Do you remember your first poem?
ES: I think I was 15. I wrote a poem about looking at the different cuts of fish in the fish market. In 2019, Literary Mama, which is a wonderful online journal about motherhood, published one of my poems for the first time. It was a poem about some bracelets given to me by my daughter for Christmas. The poem was about how to be the person that your daughter wants you to be while still staying true to yourself.
NBL: What goes into a good poem?
ES: A really good poem offers an opportunity for the reader to be part of the creative experience. I think sometimes people are put off by poetry because it does expect a little bit more from the reader than a story does. But that is part of the magic of poetry. You’re creating the meaning with the writer, and you are both bringing your own associations to it.
A really good poem offers a reader something immediate in the images, in the senses, in the language that they can grab onto and find pleasure in right away. And it also offers something to hold onto and work through later. A good poem doesn’t give up all of its secrets right away. It takes time and unpacks new ideas if you stay with it.
NBL: What’s it like being a published writer?
ES: The excitement of seeing your name on a book or in a journal that published your poem is exhilarating. But the best part is having friends that you’ve made through your writing because you love their work and they love yours.
With “My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties” I had so much more of that experience — seeing people sharing it on Instagram or sending me messages saying, ‘I loved this poem from this book,’ or reading reviews of it. Those wonderful experiences came about because I had developed more of a community than I had when my first book, “None But Witches,” came out.
NBL: What is the creative process like for you and where do you find inspiration?
ES: I would say, as a poet, I am a project poet. My books tend to have a theme instead of being a collection of different poems. “None But Witches” began not as a book but as a 2018 New Year’s resolution to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in one year. I didn’t make it, it took me two years.
I started reading the plays and I had a lot of thoughts but I didn’t have anybody to talk about them with. Nobody else was reading the plays with me, so I started writing poems. Once I had written seven or eight I thought, ‘Oh, you could do this about all the plays, and you would have a whole collection of poems.’
Most of the poems in that book are about female characters because Shakespeare actually is terrible to the women in his plays. Either their parents are getting killed, their children are getting killed, or they’re in love with someone they can’t marry. Awful things happen to them all the time.
It’s not something I would have noticed if I’d been reading just one play, but reading them all back-to-back, it was overwhelming. Poems about women form the backbone of the poems, although they’re not all downers. There are a lot of funny poems in the book.
Similarly with “Scythe,” I had an idea about Marie Antoinette and her gardens, and once I started thinking about her it expanded and expanded and expanded into a book of poems rather than just a couple of poems.
NBL: How prolific are you?
ES: When I’m in the middle of a project I’m pretty prolific, maybe three poems a month, which is almost a whole book by the end of the year. When I’m between projects it could be months. I also spend a lot of time revising.
NBL: Do you find Southeastern Massachusetts to be creatively inspiring?
ES: Oh yeah. I work and I have children and a little thing called the pandemic happened, and because of that, I’ve felt disconnected from anything that was happening. I’ve only recently connected with some of the wider things that are happening in New Bedford especially. I am amazed at the richness of the cultural things that are going on.
I remember when I first started dating my husband, No Problemo had just opened downtown. I thought, ‘Oh wow, the skate punks have opened a burrito joint. This is the beginning. Stuff is going to happen in New Bedford now.’ And that totally turned out to be true.
New Bedford has so much cool stuff going on now and I’m delighted. A couple of weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, I did a reading at Groundwork that 30 people attended. It was phenomenal. There were great local poets, people reading at the open mic, people who came just to listen.
Sarah Mulvey and Anomaly Poetry are running cool events. The Art Museum has a wonderful open mic. I see what’s happening at the Kilburn Mill, so many new businesses, creative businesses. This area is wonderful right now.
NBL: Finding a publisher can be a challenge for writers. How have you found them and what has the process been like?
ES: With poets it’s much different than for fiction writers. Much of the time fiction writers will have an agent and the agent shops around their collection for them. Fiction writers have two humps to get over. First they have to find somebody who wants to represent them, then that person has to sell their book.
Poets have a much more direct process. A press like River River Books (in Durham, North Carolina) will have an open reading period. Anybody with a completed manuscript can submit to it. After the River River editors read all of the submissions, they typically choose two books to publish from more than 400 submissions. They always have to reject books that they really love!
It’s a process of continually sending your manuscript over and over again. Oftentimes you’ll get feedback from editors about what they liked or didn’t like that you can use to revise your collection.
In fact, the first time I submitted this collection to River River, it was rejected. I continued working on it, and I made a lot of changes, and they wanted to see it again. They were really impressed with the changes that I had made and they decided to offer me a publication contract.
NBL: What does this new book, “Scythe” mean to you?
ES: This new book is an exploration of the garden as a place where I can go to find respite and comfort and solace. I love to garden. But during the pandemic I read a lot of media that was encouraging people to deal with the difficulties of the pandemic by gardening. I 100% support that and at the same time it made me uncomfortable.
I realized that if you had a place that you could go to garden, you really were in a place of privilege and you probably were not as impacted by the pandemic as people who did not have that outdoor place to go to.
The parks were closed. The beach was closed. People who didn’t have their own backyards to go into were really out of luck. The divide between people who had access to nature and those who didn’t got me thinking about how gardens can be something that keeps us apart from each other as well as something that connects us with the natural world.
It might seem strange to connect Marie Antoinette with that. She was a very passionate gardener herself. She had these private gardens where she lived at the Versailles palace in France that she used to escape from being in public all the time as the queen. She was somebody with a lot of privilege who was also trapped by her circumstances.
I started thinking about how her choices contributed to the devastation of the French Revolution. A lot of what we’re doing now, especially as Americans who are very consumeristic, is contributing to a revolution in terms of the fact that we’re living unsustainably on this planet.
NBL: What’s your interest in Marie Antoinette and her gardens? Why is she such a muse for you?
ES: France has been part of my entire life. My father was a real lover of France and we travelled there a lot growing up. When I was really young my parents taught English in Algeria, which was a French-speaking country at the time. They had just won independence from France about seven or eight years before my parents went to teach there.
I love Marie Antoinette’s gardens at Versailles. They’re exceptionally beautiful and reflective of her personal taste. I love gardens and I love France, they naturally appeal to me.
But the real inspiration for this book actually came from my friend Amy’s daughter when we were picking blueberries. Amy said, ‘Oh, I love this so much,’ and her daughter was like, ‘It kind of reminds me of Marie Antoinette’s fake farm.’ That made me laugh so much because we all want to play at being a farmer but none of us actually want to be a farmer. We just want to do the fun stuff like picking blueberries rather than hauling manure around.
The experience of being a woman is important in all of my books. Being a mother comes up over and over again. In Shakespeare, many of the women are mothers and the experiences that they have with their children are often quite heart-wrenching. The plays make me think of my own children and how I would react if I were placed in those situations.
The poems in “My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties” are more autobiographical. They deal with ordinary experiences of motherhood like taking my daughter to swim lessons or harvesting honey from our beehives. Farm play again!
There’s joyfulness and sometimes difficulty. As a mother, you worry about what will happen to your children. That’s a big theme in “Scythe” too, both for me and Marie Antoinette. She lost her children in the Revolution basically. She paid really dearly for the mistakes that she made and I hope that I will not have to pay in the same way for any mistakes I may be making.
We want to take care of our children. That’s a theme in my books — how often the world makes it very difficult to care for your children.
NBL: Do you find that most of your readers are women?
ES: Yes. In general, I think women read more poetry than men. And I think that women read more poetry that’s written by women. But men are invited too. Come on over and read some poems!
NBL: What do you enjoy about the medium of poetry?
ES: I love the craft of it. I love being surprised by the poem going in a direction that I didn’t anticipate. I also love working on a poem, searching for the right image and engaging language, arranging the words on the page in a way that helps shape the reader’s experience of the poem.
Do I want long lines or do I want short lines? Do I want the poem to move around on the page? Poems are full of interesting decisions that change the experience of reading them. What happens if you add another narrative piece to it? What happens if you change an image? I love playing with the effects these choices have.
NBL: What do you hope to achieve when you write a poem?
ES: I hope a poem will interest me, more than anything else. I want to be interested in it. I want to go someplace that I didn’t expect when I started. And I want to feel that even if the effect of the poem is not beautiful that it has moments of beauty in it.
NBL: What are some misconceptions about poetry? Do you have to be an erudite snob to enjoy it? How would you encourage people to enjoy it?
ES: I think poetry is totally underrated, but of course I’d say that as a poet. The poet Billy Collins has a great metaphor for enjoying poetry. He says that poetry is like a lake. Some people want to swim out to the middle of the lake and dive down as far as they can. And some people just want to wade along the edge of the lake. And both of those people are having really good experiences. Nobody would ever say, ‘You’re doing the lake wrong.’
Pick up a book of poetry. If you want to wade around in it a little bit and you see a couple of things that you like, that’s great. If you want to swim out to the middle of the lake, put your goggles on and see what’s down there. That’s great too.
There’s so much poetry out there that is accessible for different reasons. People from all different kinds of communities write poetry. People of all different ages write poetry. There’s spoken word poetry, there’s poetry that’s really difficult to understand. Some people want to read poetry that was written a thousand years ago. There’s something for everyone.
The only mistake is worrying that you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t like a poem, go find another one. If one lake is too cold, find a warmer one.
NBL: As someone who’s had as much success as you’ve had, do you have any advice for aspiring poets and writers?
ES: I have three pieces of advice. First, find a community. Find a group of people who are going to support you and push your writing. Have people who you trust read your writing.
The second is, good writers are readers. If you want to be a poet, you need to read poetry. If you want to be a songwriter, you need to listen to music. If you want to be a painter you need to look at paintings.
The third is, rejection is not personal. Every writer gets rejected over and over and over again. If you start writing and you get rejected, know that it doesn’t matter at all. It has nothing to do with you. The editor or the publisher wasn’t a match, but that’s fine. You just have to keep going. Rejection is a huge part of being a writer. My work has been rejected literally hundreds of times.
Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
