“Are there stories written about rabbits without trembling?” Emilie Menzel asks in her new work The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024). “Is a rabbit anything at all?” But answers don’t seem to be what Menzel seeks so much as the act of questioning, wondering. In doing so, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit unfurls as a shapeshifting lyric of embodiment and longing, grief and transformation, gazing and being gazed upon.
This book-length poem hovers in the hybrid space between poem and prose poetry, with twenty-one numbered sections comprised of short, stanza-like prose poems. But before breaking into sections, the work begins with a prologue of sorts in the form of a two-columned contrapuntal poem. Immediately, the reader is given a choice of how to read, along with the impression that multiple possible readings exist. It’s a perfect entry to a work that deals with context and expectations, the language and ideas we ascribe to bodies and gender, and how interpretation can vary based on the circumstances and conditions of the gaze.
While The Girl Who Became a Rabbit reads fluidly as a single entity, each of its sections contain unique ruminations, at once ordered and disorderly, embracing intimacy with dips into the raw and visceral, the domestic and wild. The poem is rooted in the real but never far from fable: “The better to eat you with my pretty.” Because, as Menzel reveals, identities, bodies, and language are mercurial, “And the mind is very willing to mistake correlation for connection if it appears to add order and control to the world’s pattern.”
Throughout the piece, Menzel’s prose swirls and trots and flutters. It explores homes, bodies, and body-as-home. Bodies formed and performing, shadows untangling from torsos and finding their own way. “In mornings, I must acknowledge my shadow or spend the day in darkness,” Menzel writes. The body is a site of both celebration and strain, and Menzel’s poetry reflects that, slipping tonally from mellifluous elegance to harsher truths. “Build a body back to clarify: love is as much a choice as an impulse, a metal chain down a pink torn throat, a lure unhooked, the days you awake and it is not yet tomorrow. The house a feeling of a shrinking enclosure.”
Compression and folding are prominent sensations in The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, as is the idea that bodies are open to interpretation, perceived within the varying context of their environments. It is possible to feel at once invisible and dangerously perceived. “I was uneasy, anxious, did not listen to my body. I ignored the body, it became the body. My body became the boy who cried wolf.”
And yet,
It does get easier to live with a body, to live in a body, to live with this body. Because that’s what a home looks like: it has been lived in and loved a long time. Designing a home seems to require faith that you will know when you have arranged the home correctly. In the dark, sitting at the windows, I keep the interior of the turning body in this turning light.
Across the lyric, characters are often looking through windows or being looked at through them. A stranger in a window might well be one’s own reflection. As a reader, I became very conscious of the act of observing, peering in on the subjects through the window of words. Here, Menzel speaks to power and privilege, again with their signature balance of softness and slicing: “If you gaze, gaze gently. Those of us gazed learn most quickly to be more gentle gazers. Those of us rarely under the knife are often unaware of our own carving power.”
Unspoken threats loom within the pages. Grief runs like an underground stream, drawn up through the soil and into the skin. “This is my body after the storm,” Menzel writes. Absence creates meaning. “A film is the movement between the flickering.” The writing grows haunted, tinged with fraught religion:
It was a compulsion, a pulled unavoidable act. The creature on the dais in the center of the room a monster, say creature, say it was a creature: he saw me exposed and skinned my chest open, my body lying on the ground, his eyes above. He could have looked into the into of my body. He could have held the into of my body. He could have could peer, he could he my body, you had to lie on your back to feel any ability to speak the room.
There are moments in this work—particularly moments of emotional intensity, like the one above—when the sentences don’t make expected grammatical sense. Rather, the reader must make sense of them. And while certain sentences may seem odd out of context, when read within the whole, they were often my favorites lines, lines I wanted to read and reread, speak aloud to see how they felt on my tongue. “Pour upon my shaking animal, and I am to pretend appealing.”
Menzel understands the strength and variety of words, the kinds of words that pierce and flay. Kindly words to caress and soothe. She unsettles her sentences, blurring their meanings into something stranger. Complex sentiments feel all the more authentic for their refusal to be clearly articulated, framed behind a pane of glass through which unexpected eyes may peer. Always, there is a duality or multiplicity. Menzel references selkies—mythological creatures that change form between human and seal; okapi—which are often described as part zebra, part giraffe; snails—many species of which are hermaphroditic—whose spiraled shells are both body and home.
Menzel takes this shapeshifting one step further via words that could function multiple ways within a sentence. “A sweet little savagery, he tells me, you exhibit, my lips licked.” The word “exhibit” here might serve as a noun—the subject is something gazed upon, studied, paid a fee to see. Or it may be construed as a verb—the “you” in question performing, displaying themselves. Still, the poem’s narrator maintains a dogged autonomy: “my savagery is genderless and sleeps my body into exhaustion . . . Not everything we touch must touch the high holy.”
There is a dreamy, viscous quality to Menzel’s writing. Associative wordplay offers a lilting, tripping feel to the text, a playful delight to contrast moments of darkness. I felt swept by the current of prose, here one moment, there the next, in a way that might have been jarring were the waves not so sweet with foam. There is a world above Menzel’s lyric sea and below it. At times, the text turns outward—like a direct address to the reader, or the writer directly addressing herself—pondering theories about the utility of writing, of sentimentality, of where we draw meaning in our bodies and lives:
The real question is this: when you die, will you have written all the rabbit fables you intended? You must think ambitiously and hope for many rabbit fables. In giving yourself many rabbits, you gift yourself a kindness. Do not worry about how to justify the fables. Do not worry about how to justify playfulness. Consider an array of rabbits, a rabbit as observed through a window, a rabbit as a stone, a rabbit formed for a child, a child formed for a rabbit.
And later,
Why would a description of a rabbit be important, hold import, hold importance? Can you say with sincerity that a description of a rabbit, in written or drawn form, has not shaped you as a person?…How many people’s perceptions of creatures do you need to change for your work to count as important? Three rabbits? Ten? Can the lyric alone be enough?
How do we perceive ourselves? “I am not the girl with the beautiful hair,” Menzel writes multiple times. “If I am mad, how do we decide I am so?” How do we know if a home is decorated to our taste, if the walls are hung with just the right trappings? How do we know if our skin wraps our bones in a way that is true? How do we determine what a work of art means, what poetry means?
Ultimately, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is as opaque as it is translucent, filled with flickers of the ephemeral grotesque, not stream-of-conscious so much as stream-of-existence. I read the lyric again after a span of days had passed and I had become a new person. What a delight: to read with different eyes, different understanding. New metaphors arose. The creatures took different shapes. Meaning is fleeting. Meaning is self-made. “I have been complicit in slant panes of light.” The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a reminder that amidst our grief, our light, our hybridity, we are constantly being formed anew. We are all of us trembling. How terrifying. How beautiful.
