The Girl Who Became a Rabbit

A Debutiful Best Poetry Book of 2024

The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a book-length lyric, a dark, ruminative poem that pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.

Examining reclaimed narratives of embodiment, gentle hauntings, and fables of the body, Emilie Menzel approaches the body as a home we consciously build, spinning myths and fairytales as ways to rewrite the body’s history. 

In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter, Menzel’s writing is wild, lush, recursive, and intentionally messy. A mesmerizing and unique debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.

Emilie Menzel is the winner of the 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

Praise for The Girl Who Became a Rabbit

“Recursive, ambitious, strange and beautiful, this book-length lyric explores the way trauma and abuse make a creature of us, and asks what it’s possible to become in their aftermath. I fell into this world of this book—its rabbits, and soft deer, sliced cow-eyes and wolves—the way you wade into a cold body of water, slowly and then all at once. I couldn’t put it down. And, when I finished, I was changed.” —Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I've Taken My Body, contest judge

“A delectably nimble collection, ranging in scope from the ordinary to the divine—and all points between. Emilie Menzel is a marvelous writer and cataloguer of what connects and estranges us from our lives.” —Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“If what you wish is to be for a while in a world that will inspire you to think playfully and with kindness and persistence and an openness to that which is not immediately beheld, you have found your book and your invitation to enter another world that happens to be in this one. Menzel works magic. I love this book.” —Dara Barrois/Dixon, author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

“In this astonishing debut, Emilie Menzel employs logic as a poetics of longing and grief, a vital instrument untangling trauma and its aftermath. Her images are both seductive and unflinching, electrifying and terrifying. Her lyric is the elixir I wish I could gift anyone who’s experienced girlhood.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

“An exquisite book-length poem that is full of fancy and thought-provoking prose. Every page is a masterclass in language. Reading this was an experience unlike any other. I need more books like Menzel’s The Girl Who Became a Rabbit.” —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“‘In giving yourself many rabbits, you gift yourself a kindness. Do not worry about how to justify the fables,’ writes Menzel in her tremendous, book-length lyric. Menzel pushes the boundaries of what poetry and prose can be and how language creates meaning, offering, ‘it is a skill to grow gaps…my voice discovered / through…the history of a feeling.’ Through fables, dissections, and precise and mysterious descriptions, Menzel tracks the history of said feeling, weaving in and out of points of view, around anchors of repetition, and into small turns that open into quietly sweeping movements. This is a tale that speaks of hauntings and grief and the ways a person might rewrite the rules of knowing the body, memory, and experience. Despite the serious tenor, there is also a playful daring that may be both strange and aspirational for anyone attempting to reconstruct, via language, disparate pieces of a whole. A question is posed, ‘how do you gather language for a concept you do not yet know how to see?’ Menzel begins to show us.” —Sara Verstynen, Booklist

“There is a dreamy, viscous quality to Menzel’s writing. 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. [It] 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.” —Gina Thayer, The Rumpus