I Don't Want To Be Understood

by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Overview

A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life. 

I Don’t Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.

These poems stretch from childhood to the present day—resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth—and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949944358
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	09/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a transsexual poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, The Southeast Review, MoMA Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and is currently a professor of creative writing. Jennifer lives in West Virginia with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.

Editorial Reviews

Recommended by the Poetry Foundation
A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry
A Finalist for the 2025 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
Shortlisted with Distinction - The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

"Espinoza’s poetry hinges on this balance between the numinous experience of world and self vs. the mundane-yet-dangerous acts that make up survival within our capitalist system"
—Elliott Sky Case, Frozen Sea

"In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don't Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems' speaker dA Finalist for the 2025 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literaturereams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness."
—Oscar Ivins, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"I Don't Want To Be Understood is existence as resistance. It dreams of a world free of fixed labels, chronicling the nuance and complexity of trans experience and erasure. Forging new identity with each page, J. Jennifer Espinoza pushes beyond every boundary, writing that "it helps to have a name even though a name is a room you can never leave." I Don't Want To Be Understood dismantles cishet narratives of 'normalcy,' reminding us that queerness is a vast, expansive spectrum."
—Wroxanna Work

"In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s latest stunning collection, she goes back to material that might have seemed more appropriate for her first book, as Drew explains in her review on Autostraddle. Drew writes: I Don’t Want To Be Understood takes on "formative subject matter written with the craft and maturity of a seasoned writer. It’s as if it took that time and skill in order to properly approach these moments." Drew also praises the book as "unafraid to take formal risks," playing with formatting and punctuation and mixing literal and figurative narrative. Read these poems and let them surprise you as they did Drew.”
—"The Best Queer Books of 2024," Autostraddle

"In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's undaunted fourth poetry collection, I Don't Want to Be Understood, transgender identity allows for reinvention but also entails fear of physical and legislative violence. ... Alliteration and repetition construct litanies of rejection but, ultimately, of hope: 'When I call myself a woman I am praying.'"
—Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness

"A tour de force of poetic voice, Espinoza does it again."
—"The Best Queer Poetry Releases of 2024," Autostraddle

"In this autobiographical poetry collection, the poet traces her life from childhood to the present, including her repressive religious upbringing. She rejects conventional trans narratives, embracing the messiness and complexities of her reality. These poems stand in opposition to the idea that trans people have to convince society to grant them personhood or permission to exist."
—Book Riot

"...Espinoza’s resilient vulnerability makes for a wonderfully accessible collection exploring entanglements between desires, fears, misgivings, traumas, mundane triumphs, and more. Yet the collection resists easy categorization ... I Don’t Want to Be Understood is interested in one’s own value to voice their experience, not a need to make a body knowable; in connections, not academics; survival, not compliance. With its dismissal of easy legibility, Espinoza’s latest volume is one to add not only to any collection on trans poetics, but one for any reader interested in confessional and lyric poetry that refuses to be neatly pinned down."
—Rhiannon Thorne, Up the Staircase Quarterly

"Espinoza tenderly explores what it means to be a trans woman in a world that rejects the mere notion of transness. ... The language and images in these poems imbue difficult—sometimes negative—thoughts and situations with a sense of beauty and wonder. For the speaker, life is not just about survival but about living as fully as possible, on her own terms."
—Leonora Simonovis, The Poetry Foundation

"...it was such a joy to spend time with the words of this artist I admire. It was at once familiar and new, as I have changed, Jennifer has changed. Her voice holds the same power and wit that first connected with me, but nothing here is a retread. It’s a strong collection of work, unafraid to take formal risks. The thrill of I Don’t Want to Be Understood is the ways it surprised me and the ways it surprises even from first page to last."
—Drew Burnett Gregory, Autostraddle

"There are few writers as attuned to the potential of metaphor as Jennifer Espinoza, whose poems make this gesture something more like alchemy. From the first poem, where a trans woman stopped by the TSA blooms into a cloud of energy, Espinoza's poems enact a radical, surrealist, transmutation; her strange, dream-like recollections are spaces of un- and re-making, herself and the world. I Don't Want To Be Understood is simply a triumph—virtuosic, heartbreaking, and searing in its social critiques."
—torrin a. greathouse

“I Don’t Want to Be Understood is a blistering and a balm. Its speaker holds inside herself the garden, lush, the attending rot, seed and bloom, and the desire to be tended and tenderly so. Alongside the garden, Espinoza charts the cosmology of a woman come into herself in a world of violence, a world that would undo the wonder of this speaker. I leave this book deeply moved by Espinoza’s insistence on nurturing a green hope, a green heart.”
—Donika Kelly

From the Publisher