FORTHCOMING FROM RIVER RIVER PRESS

Available through 3 Mile Harbor Press

PRAISE FOR NONE BUT WITCHES

With her wonderful first book of poems, Elizabeth Sylvia celebrates in None but Witches the teeming population of William Shakespeare’s plays.  From the book’s first sentence she clarifies her joyfully critical theme: “I used to believe the men who told me / Shakespeare was remarkable for making / female characters who were as round as men.” And so the queens, daughters, lovers, and witches are among the Bard’s go-to stereotypes that Sylvia’s poems resuscitate, providing the women their own stage, by themselves, by name, honoring their distinct human dignities.  In poems as formally various as the characters she writes about, Sylvia gives us ghazals and shaped poems, echoing columns, curses, and free verse both felicitous and shapely. This fine poet even performs a shadow-part herself, tracing King Edward’s hidden daughter, who is “never . . . onstage / except in the mouths of those who bid on her.” That daughter? Why, Elizabeth, of course. In providing a humanizing critique of the Bard’s lasting gift, Elizabeth Sylvia makes her own shining work of art.   —David Baker, author of Whale Fall

In Elizabeth Sylvia’s lovely and haunting book, Shakespeare’s women take the spotlight, unleashing their grief, rage, and desire to show us the roundness of their lives. You don’t need to have studied the Bard to recognize these women captured in Sylvia’s lush monologues and portraits–mothers mourning their children, queens striving for power, girls disguising their bodies. In the opening poem, we read, “All/they do is orbit, casting here and there/reflected light, and when they light/the path, it is a man’s path they light.” And yet in None but Witches, Sylvia gives these women their own path, one richly illuminated with metaphor and wit. We are lucky to be invited on the journey. —Julie Danho, author of Those Who Keep Arriving

Through deeply researched poems that deftly capture what it means to be a powerful woman Elizabeth Sylvia’s debut poetry collection, None But Witches, braids poems based on Shakespeare’s female characters with poems that share a contemporary point of view, “So I love how the women in Shakespeare / always say exactly what they think is true.” At a time when women are often silenced Sylvia celebrates women speaking their minds with rich images of mouths and tongues: “shiv in the mouths,” “freighted tongues,” “fanged mouths,” “A woman must hold cunning / like a needle, embroider lilied / pillows of her words.” Too often Shakespeare’s male protagonists view the female characters as “Witches. // Witches // all the way down.” but these women are not witches they aresimply speaking their minds: “Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak” (As You Like It). None But Witches is an extraordinarily unique, imaginative and important first book that speaks a truth that needs to be heard.  —Cindy Veach, author of Her Kind

 Shakespeare rarely passes the Bechdel test, but in Elizabeth Sylvia’s brilliant debut, the women get the last word—sometimes a laugh, sometimes a guttural scream as they insist they are more than “a pair of tits attached to broken, / a hurt circuit flipped again and again.” The intelligence of the female characters is of little consequence in the plays, Sylvia laments, because “All they do is orbit, casting here and there / reflected light” on “a man’s path.” In None But Witches, women’s voices blaze. These poems hold “a little shiv in their mouths”—“a little razor blade for later”—and any one of them could cut you open. Which is just what you want a poem to do.   

— Josephine Yu, author of Prayer Book for the Anxious

 
In these self-assured poems, Shakespeare’s women take center stage. Inhabiting a myriad of voices, some historical and some wholly imagined, Elizabeth Sylvia explores the minds of these fascinating characters, offering a corrective to the narratives that Ophelia and Juliet and Miranda and Desdemona have been allotted, in which “All/ they do is orbit, casting here and there/ reflected light.” In Sylvia’s poems, Shakespeare’s women have agency and schemes and desires and intelligence.  Sylvia writes that “An understudy earns her keep by learning/ all the lines.” And like the women whose stories she inhabits, Sylvia is an accomplished understudy, slipping in and out of character and form with ease. These poems are wise and wondering and irrepressible, “roaring that we are all more than would be made of us.” 

                                                            — Meghan Dunn, author of Curriculum

None But Witches was reviewed at For Women’s Eyes