When I was first coming out in 2017, few artists were as important to me as poet Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Her collection There Should Be Flowers spoke deeply to me in the way it depicted the experience of being a trans women with both a blunt specificity and an expansive spirituality. Somehow, I loved her 2018 follow-up Outside of the Body There Is Something Like Hope even more. The next year, I was lucky enough to profile Jennifer, my first interview for this site, and since then I’ve continued to read her work whenever she publishes a new poem online.
I used to clutch onto Jennifer’s words with visceral need. But now I am older — in years and transness — and that need has developed into a more comfortable want. Her latest book I Don’t Want to Be Understood comes out today and 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 book is split into two sections: 1) VIOLENCE IS THE SCROLL UPON WHICH HER HISTORY IS RECORDED and 2) AND THEN CAME THE NAMING. The first part, especially, feels more narrative than her past work. Many of the poems are about her father, detailing literal memories.
In a poem titled Birthday Suits she writes:
On his command, I drove us
out to Hollywood where
you could get three sets of suits
for a hundred bucks.
But then later in the same poem:
what I was
beneath the cover of the flesh:
five million faggy mountains
slicing through fields full
of dreamed-up tongues and
unnamable bluish grasses
each blade the length
of a universe
stretching inward toward
a singular point
of
life-sustaining unlogic—
Her work is never literal for too long. Or, rather, she questions why that first section is literal and the second poetic. Are those latter words not truer?
By writing so much about youth and transition, I Don’t Want to Be Understood sometimes feels in subject even more like a first collection than her actual first collection i’m alive/it hurts/i love it. And yet, it’s this 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.
Across both sections, the work is often more formally experimental than past poems. The simplicity of neat lines and stanzas has been replaced with a less strict approach to formatting and punctuation. It feels like a natural progression for a writer whose words have always felt like they were bursting out of their phrases, desperate to crawl off the page.
The narratives of the book are not limited to clear memories. There are three poems about going through airport security — the first especially not limited to the “real.” And, in the second part, she even dips into sci-fi with a poem titled Housewife from Planet X.
She writes:
On Planet X, memory is not. a part of the mind, but a chemical
substance, like water.
When she sweats, she remembers. When she drinks, she
remembers.
It’s thrilling to read an artist like Jennifer experiment and play. This feels like a risky collection in so many different ways. After a first read, my favorite poem is the first of two titled A Confession, a very direct piece about a sexual encounter. It feels insufficient to repeat only an excerpt — no one line encompassing the ways it’s complicated, painful, hopeful, upsetting, and, yes, erotic. It captures the contradictions that often exist within sex for trans people and does so with the weight of clarity.
When I first heard that Joshua Jennifer Espinoza had a new collection, I expected to like it. 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. I may not have the same need for these words as I did half a decade ago, but I sure am grateful to have them anyway.
I Don’t Want to Be Understood is now available from Alice James Books.
