A review by laura_sackton
I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Most of these poems are about being trans and the violence exerted on trans people. About the speaker’s estrangement from her family, about the ways that being trans and being true to herself caused this rift that is so painful. There are poems about the fear of going out into the street and how ordinary that fear is, and how chilling that is. Poems about moving through the airport as a trans woman. The poems all feel very matter of fact, deeply rooted in these daily routines of life, the putting on of makeup, the calculations of whether it is safe to be on what street, with a certain person. A lot about how it feels to have survived a world that is not trying to keep you alive. 

The prose poems were my favorite by far. The language in those feels the most exciting, the most exacting. There is one where she talks about how this isn’t a poem, how she isn’t a poem, and about all the things she is, and it becomes more and more fantastical. In another she describes having sex with a woman who isn’t really seeing her, who keeps saying she is so beautiful, who is fetishizing her but also giving her some of what she wants. There are all these incredibly specific moments. There is another one about being searched by TSA and it becomes this wild fantastical story about this trans woman’s genitals being a cosmic blob and causing havoc. These ordinary details and fantastical twists are so compelling.