In this intricate debut, (Hub City Press), Emilie Menzel assembles , 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, 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.
* : 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 , 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 .