I Don’t Want to Be Understood

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s fourth poetry collection, I Don’t Want to Be Understood, the speaker addresses their past self, in the second person:

Every day was ordinary.
You’d wake up and pretend
to be a boy.
You’d go to sleep and dream
of being a woman.
Eventually you never
regained consciousness.

Espinoza tenderly explores what it means to be a trans woman in a world that rejects the mere notion of transness. Against a narrative in which transness is an aberration to be condemned, the author beautifully weaves a counternarrative where transitioning is

just what happens
when you realize
how far away stars are.

[…]

How a life is an open thing
leaking out into
the air around it.

These poems grapple with the complexities of the trans speaker’s everyday life experiences and the barrage of emotions that oscillate between self-acceptance and self-effacement in the face of hatred and violence:

I want to forget I am
this woman in this world
whose eyes are trained
to look for any chance
of violence––how a face
is a landscape and then
becomes a graveyard.

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:

For most of my life, I existed between galaxies.

            It was cold and empty and I forgot about matter.

I could not imagine a thing. So, I

            invented a world from nothing and lived inside it.

Some of the poems in this collection delve into the surreal and speculative––“On Planet X, memory is not a part of the mind, but a chemical / substance, like water.” These are spaces in which the speaker can “say what needs to be said / about what has happened here.”