I Don't Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
I Don't Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Publisher: Alice James Books (August 2024)
Purchase @ Alice James Books
Publisher: Alice James Books (August 2024)
Purchase @ Alice James Books
MicroReview by Rhiannon Thorne.
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.
Several poems meditate on disconnection from family, as may be expected from autobiographical poetics. “To My Parents” expresses a deep hurt over the speaker’s position in the family, describing and redescribing it 31 times. She is the “ghost,” the “maggot,” and “the hole in my door someone kicked” (17). “To My Parents” neither lays the blame at their feet nor exonerates them—indeed, the poem leaves the impression that the speaker, too, oscillates between self-blame and self-forgiveness, as is common for adults working through their childhood traumas. In “Loss Ritual,” the speaker addresses religious family lost to choosing queer desire over self-denial: “You wanted to/ be holy and righteous […] I wanted to be holy/ and righteous because life is short/ and sad and we all deserve to be/ loved” (52).
But at tension with these poems of loss are glimpses of celebration for the messiness of life. Two poems, both aptly titled “A Confession,” bring together confessional poetry with the collection’s confrontation with restrictive Christianity. And they are uncomfortable. And they are sexy.
Still other poems speak to the title’s theme. A favorite, “It Doesn’t Matter if I’m Understood,” is a nihilistic reprisal of the collection’s title that points to a futility to attempt to be known—as if being known would change the inherent danger of being a woman:
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)
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.
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.
Several poems meditate on disconnection from family, as may be expected from autobiographical poetics. “To My Parents” expresses a deep hurt over the speaker’s position in the family, describing and redescribing it 31 times. She is the “ghost,” the “maggot,” and “the hole in my door someone kicked” (17). “To My Parents” neither lays the blame at their feet nor exonerates them—indeed, the poem leaves the impression that the speaker, too, oscillates between self-blame and self-forgiveness, as is common for adults working through their childhood traumas. In “Loss Ritual,” the speaker addresses religious family lost to choosing queer desire over self-denial: “You wanted to/ be holy and righteous […] I wanted to be holy/ and righteous because life is short/ and sad and we all deserve to be/ loved” (52).
But at tension with these poems of loss are glimpses of celebration for the messiness of life. Two poems, both aptly titled “A Confession,” bring together confessional poetry with the collection’s confrontation with restrictive Christianity. And they are uncomfortable. And they are sexy.
Still other poems speak to the title’s theme. A favorite, “It Doesn’t Matter if I’m Understood,” is a nihilistic reprisal of the collection’s title that points to a futility to attempt to be known—as if being known would change the inherent danger of being a woman:
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)
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.
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Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I'm Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices 2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and is currently a professor of creative writing. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog. |
