I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is billed as “drawing from the autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.” It is a sympathetic collection of verse that has a complicated relationship with its own title, a quality that underscores the volume’s own reckoning with opposing desires between safety and aversion to accepting the narratives women are told will protect them. 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—it is not a collection invested in being a trans narrative that argues for the humanity of its speaker, and, by way of, trans individuals, instead it is an invitation into a constellation of experiences.

Excerpt from “It Doesn’t Matter if I’m Understood”:

Here us women are
crackling like sparklers above a lawn
scraping diamonds from asphalt
giving praise to the mountains before us

Our love and our grace and our tenderness
enough to change the shape of the universe

You say goddess or you say dead girl
We live in the margins but don’t get a taste
of the joy of being there

[…]

One day we will be allowed to exist
and you will never see us again (p 73)

Published in 2024, I Don’t Want to Be Understood is available from Alice James Books for $24.95. Read the full review at Up the Staircase Quarterly.