Named as one of the Guardian's Best Books of 2023

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?


'Unlike anything else you'll ever read.' InStyle Australia

'I inhaled this book.' Dylin Hardcastle, author of Below Deck

'Madison Godfrey wields words with exquisite precision and Dress Rehearsals is as taut, 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