By: Allie Farrell
(Note: lines are cited by section #, then page #. Example: [1.7] for section 1, page 7)
Photo credit: Sean T. Bailey
Emilie Menzel, a previous contributor to Cream City Review, debuted her first book of poetry through the Hub City Press in September. The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a lyric told in 21 sections, weaving references to literature, film, and mythology, with thematic threads of “fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness” to explore “how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.” Menzel is the winner of the 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, which comes as no surprise when reading. This haunting work is a fable, a metamorphosis, and a ghost story. It is full of ruminations and observations that build into tragic, tender, or even deliciously cathartic revelations about the body, spirit, and the written word.
The form of the first poem, the lyric’s “prologue,” foreshadows Menzel’s desire to have the reader picture the narrator in multiple bodies and forms. As a variation of the contrapuntal, the left-hand verse describes the narrator as a rabbit, while the right-hand is less clear and assumes a human form. Together, the narrator’s “creatureliness” becomes ambiguous while also establishing intelligence and introspection.
Transformations and transfigurations, for Menzel’s narrator, are a means of survival, as the “self” is often demonstrated as more incorporeal than its container. Many bodies are built and rebuilt over the course of the book. A few examples demonstrate the creation of a body as a means of protection, as early on the narrator says, “I built a body like I built a/ home—to keep the other out” [1.4], while an additional purpose is later stated: that they will “Build a body back to clarify: love is as much a choice/ as an impulse…” [2.10]. The act of creation, too, is protective, even if the body is not the narrator’s own: “Still wet in this turning, I built a body like a child who is/ folding…little body oh/ the body I formed” [10.27], but with its own limits, as the narrator is “…already skeptical…/ to care for anything built out of a jumbled skin/ skeleton.” [13.43]
The narrator picks up and puts down a variety of masks; the girl becomes a rabbit in the title, but she also becomes a swan, a seal, a ghost, all “[keep] a flickering in-between [their] bodies” [11.36] on black and white film or, rather, on black ink on a white page.
Menzel’s word choice and wordplay contribute beautifully to this visual carousel. Both readings of a verse often represent ambiguity in what form the narrator takes: for instance, a “season of trauma”[10.28] is a hunting season for a creature or a difficult period of a person’s life, or describing someone who “kept [the narrator] broken to keep [her] here” [5.17] possibly refers to emotional turmoil or physical abuse in a relationship, or even domesticating an animal to be “housebroken.” Menzel begs the reader to interpret and reinterpret her language, ask themselves whether it is better to be human, animal, both, or neither, in one stanza or another.
In all honesty, the nature (pun intended) of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is difficult to express without going too far into summarization. Emilie Menzel’s voice is distinctly lush, confessional without creeping too far into autobiography, and both fluid and sharp in its delivery. The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a lyric that hooks its readers, claws sinking in, and stays with them long after they’ve read the final lines.
The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is published by Hub City Press and distributed by Publishers Group West/Ingram. More information and purchasing options can be found here.
Bios:
Emilie Menzel is a poet and librarian whose hybridities have garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry, and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as an editor and librarian for The Seventh Wave community. Raised on barefoot Georgia summers, they now live in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.
Allie Farrell is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, studying English with an emphasis in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. She focuses on hauntings, history, and how the two intertwine. Allie is an Assistant Editor at The Cream City Review.
