'A memoir made of poetry, Dress Rehearsals documents a decade of performing womanhood in a non-binary body.
'My femininity is not a survival instinct, it is a song.
'In their brilliant new poetry collection, Madison Godfrey documents a decade of performing womanhood, from teenage fangirl to tender femme. Godfrey's poems approach the autobiographical body as a site of the everyday and the surreal: experiencing first crushes, mosh pits, sharpened nails, gender euphoria, and the complicated colours of desire and memory.
'Darkly witty and deeply confessional, Dress Rehearsals is a love story to the queer self. This coming-of-age memoir asks, what does it mean to wear femininity into the world, when it constitutes both a bullseye and a ballgown?
''I inhaled this book.' Dylin Hardcastle, author of Below Deck
''Madison Godfrey wields words with exquisite precision and Dress Rehearsals is as taught, seductive and deadly as a femme fatale herself. These are poems to impale yourself on. A work of distilled genius.' Yves Rees, author of All About Yves' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
'And I watch you, your reversal,
it's an honest thing when there's no one there.
Some days they feel like dress rehearsals,
some days I watch and you don't care.'
-La Dispute
'An electric and poetic manifesto of selfhood.'
'An electric and poetic manifesto of selfhood.'