Angela Veronica Wong's ELSA unfolds the story of a fictional 18th-century French demimondaine and mistress of Louis XV. Meditating on gender, identity, and the precarity of women's lives against the scrim of patriarchal power and capital, the foils of the sonnet form and storytelling shape Wong's critique. Both adhering to and breaking the strictures of rhyme and meter, much as Elsa wears and divests herself of corset and panniers, Wong's sonnets shift between the politics of the French court and the streets of New York, the poems navigating the shoals of female embodiment, as we slip between then and now, narrated and narrator.

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