Emilie Menzel on Depicting Animals in Poetry, Learning from Music, and Constructing a New Self

In this intricate debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press), Emilie Menzel assembles a new poetics of prose , a modern mythology of moments intimate, haunting, and quotidian. Its twining rhizomatic sections document the history and toll of having a body, of surviving, of loss. Here the poet turned haruspex is equipped with a lyric that is part scalpel that (joins instead of rends) and part bryologist’s loupe, gazing upon a cow’s eye, okapi, dik dik, snow leopard, owl, piglet, and other creatures. At its core, Rabbit is also a fabular primer on how to construct a self, from the reality of one’s body to its imagined forms, transformations, and possibilities. “Let the imagined body be more important than real,” Menzel writes, and in the spaces of a body and its multitudes, they instruct us how to witness through radical acts of observation. I’ve never read anything quite so spell-binding, frank, and voracious in its generous curiosity. –Diana Khoi Nguyen * Diana Khoi Nguyen : I’d like to start with part of the epigraph to your lyrically lush and feral collection—the quote is from Jennifer S. Cheng: “To build a house: one is for shelter, / the other to unfold….” I’m drawn to “unfold” as a kind of shadow-side to the notion of home and shelter, also the words “fold” and “unfold” recur throughout your collection. In another interview , you write that your work is not autobiographical, but “a fabled rendition—the silhouettes, iconography, sounds, settings of my experiences, but recombined and bent. Like if the memory were folded, or one corner pulled wide.” Tracking the various folds and unfoldings in your work brings to mind a material practice; I know you’re a gatherer. Will you kindly speak more to your relationship to (un)folding? Emilie Menzel : Jennifer S. Cheng’s books House A and Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems were enormously influential to me at the start of writing Rabbit— my orientation to narratives of a body, how myths can be domestic and quotidian, how recursion can be an act of honesty . Both of these books […]

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