How She Felt in Her First Corset, and Other Poems

This late Victorian collection captures a moment every woman has known: the collision between who you are and who the world expects you to be. The title poem, 'How She Felt in Her First Corset,' remains startling in its empathy, a young woman laced into an idealized shape, feeling the literal and metaphorical pinch of convention against her skin. Alderson grants his female subjects genuine interiority, letting us hear what women actually thought beneath the performance of femininity. The poems trace love's full spectrum: tentative first declarations, practical calculations about wealth and security, the particular grief of wanting what society forbids, and the quiet negotiations of lasting partnership. Some verses crackle with humor about courtship's absurdities; others ache with the poignancy of dreams deferred or identities suppressed. Throughout runs a persistent tension between outward compliance and inward life, a struggle that feels less period piece than perennial.