“The Girl With Antlers” by Ansel Elkins is a quirky, complex and somewhat enchanting poem. Tracing a girl’s life from her birth to her teen years, the poem starts out by describing, in gruesome detail, how a baby girl was in fact born with antlers, which made the delivery a painful, displeasing process. Abandoned, and dubbed a monster by the midwife who aided the delivery, the girl grasped onto some words her mother presented to her in a dream: “You must find joy within your own wild self.” Swept up by a concerned women in the woods, the girl spent many of her evenings, as a youth, sitting by a roaring fire, listening to the tales the women had to share. The woman did pause every now and then to watch the shadows from the girls antlers dance across the wall illuminated by the intense glow from the flames. The woman worried, the young girl did not want to wear dresses, she roamed the forest naked. She never conformed to the typical customs of those around her, rather, she stayed steadfast to her unique self. When the girl was fifteen she saw that a change had occurred, no longer were her antlers something to gawk at, they had transformed into a beautiful aspect of this young girl that only strengthened her image. The poem comes to a close with the woman saying “What you are, I cannot say but nature has created you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.” Quoting Psalm 119:14, this poem expresses the belief that humans each have something specific to themselves that sets them apart from others and regardless of what that defining characteris may be each person was created with the utmost care and consideration.