WINNER OF THE THREE MILE HARBOR POETRY PRIZE: PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH’ SYLVIA’S NONE BUT WITCHES

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

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 and Swift: New and Selected Poems

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 and Swift: New and Selected Poems

—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

Publication Date: June 2022

ISBN: 9780998340661

Pages: 89

Trade paperback: 6 x 9

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