The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (New Southern Voices Poetry Prize)

A Debutiful Best Poetry Book of 2024
2025 North Carolina Book Awards: Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, Finalist

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’s poetry hybridities have garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (selected by Molly McCully Brown), the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry (selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen), and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction (selected by Leigh Newman), and feature in such journals as the Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, and The Offing, among others. 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.