Dress Rehearsals: Review

Stylised as a triptych, Dress Rehearsals is segmented into three parts, each one as textually personal and emotionally political as the next. With each page, Godfrey introduces us to a new moment, memory or musing. In Part One, Dress Rehearsals begins in the most tender of places: girlhood. In the opening poem, titled “When I Grow Up I Want To Be The Merch Girl,” we are walked through Godfrey’’s adolescence, where “a backpack bulges with a water bottle and a glad-wrapped snack.” In this opening poem, Godfrey pens an amorous ode to one of the few roles a woman can occupy in the hardcore punk scene. This scene makes several appearances in Dress Rehearsals, with Godfrey lamenting their experience growing up and into themselves within a scene that purports to subvert gender roles, but simply reworks them. In “Merch Girl: First Time” we meet the elusive merch girl again, only this time she’s without adornment, the focus not on her “permanent-marker forearms” but on her youth; here the merch girl is subtextually undressed to reveal not an idol to be worshipped but a teenage girl. 

In Part Two we are introduced to the femme fatale, a term derived from the French femme, meaning “woman,” and the Latin fatale, meaning “disastrous, lethal.” Godfrey’s femme fatale is effortlessly seductive, wearing and wielding womanhood like a weapon. The femme fatale appears, “pastel razor held like a baton,” and we follow as Godfrey’s  persona candidly shares moments with their femme fatale counterpart. In Part Two we are invited to share Godfrey’s gaze as they tenderly observe the femme fatale in their many states: the femme fatale undresses, breaks a nail, sleeps over, goes home, chaperones a tinder date and teaches them to take a nude. These vignettes are reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, only Godfrey’s dream house is one of mirrors, the femme fatale always gazing on and being gazed upon.

Part Three takes us closest to the present day, wherein the pains of reckoning with gender are integrated with the pleasures. Part Three comprises some of Godfrey’s most intimate and honest poems. In “Longing, Three Ways” Godfrey dictates their desire like a seasoned diarist; “When Does Your Body Feel Like It Belongs To You?” reads as an emboldened love poem to the queer community. Part Three fills us with hope; part celebration, part commemoration, and part commitment to continuous survival.  

Dress Rehearsals is a sensuous and sentient ode to queer and trans love, longing and liberation. This is a book that breathes. Godfrey has taken the prism of gender and held it up to the light, inviting the reader to behold a spectrum otherwise concealed.