Dress Rehearsals

A memoir made of poetry, Dress Rehearsals documents a decade of performing womanhood in a non-binary body.


'Unlike anything else you'll ever read. It's an ode to womanhood, performative feminism and deeply confessional. Godfrey has created a deeply intimate letter to their experience of the everyday through an autobiography of sultry poetry.' InStyle Australia


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 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