Book Review: "Brat Summer Never Need End: Jennifer Espinoza, I Don’t Want to Be Understood"
I Don't Want to Be Understood
Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books, 2025
Jennifer Espinoza’s third collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024) explores the nuances of anger and rebellion. The title itself begs to be misunderstood; what others may misread as literal statement is in fact an expression of radical anger. Embracing contradictions, the title of Espinoza’s 2024 collection pushes one to ask: what is the benefit of being understood? And who has to beg for that understanding which is so easily given to others? The refusal to want to be understood is a philosophical question wrapped in a meme-able moment, a phrase steeped in classic “bratty” aesthetics.
As much as the tone of the title may appear to irreverent, the book itself belies the very real vulnerability and struggle of the voice. The impossibility of being understood is tied so closely to knowing ourselves, knowing one another. But more specifically, the ideas of being “understood” in this collection are engaged in transness, in the surveillance forced upon trans people, some even under the guise of “understanding.” In the poem, “Newsfeed,” our speaker goes through the names she’s been given such as “Dying Girl,” or “Public Debate.” These names are reductions created through surveillance in order to synthesize human beings into an easily understood idea for others, but also in a way that reduces our speaker’s own sense of self.
Espinoza utilizes naming throughout as a way to showcase how understanding cuts both ways. I Don’t Want to Be Understood is an expression of rebel culture, fighting against the idea of a singular trans narrative. Through these poems, she complicates the general positive outlook on renaming and the way that that names are meant as a way of both understanding oneself and expressing oneself to others. This is a process that Espinoza often compares to being perceived, a stepping stone to being understood. When the speaker says “You are afraid of being seen./ You are afraid of being named.” in “Every Day,” she is referring to the fear of being misnamed, as well as the fear of being seen accurately. Being understood, even by oneself, comes with danger.
This fear is key to the underlying idea of not wanting to be understood. Pushing away the hope of being understood because of the fear of never being understood. Or similarly, of never understanding oneself. As our speaker says in “Personal Statement”:
….So here’s what you need
to understand—any time I’m doing something I’m doing
something I’m afraid of.
This fear is not just rooted in being misunderstood, but the finality of the idea of being understood. In “Makeup Ritual,” our speaker says, “It helps to have a name even though/ a name is a room you can never leave.” If one is understood, it can only be momentary, yet that version of the self becomes the self that to which all is referred. Instead of being an evolving self, being perceived creates a static self. The inflexibility of being known restricts as much as it releases.
Espinoza expertly brings us into this frustration throughout I Don’t Want to Be Understood. In “Today I was Alone,” the speaker laments that “No one se]es all the invisible work I do // to avoid the daily violence of cohesion.” She denies multitudes in lieu of an evolving, immensely personal and unable to be understood self, one who exists at times through denial, through forgetting. In this collection, Espinoza reveals that often it is the knowing, the understanding that is the danger and embraces being unknown.
– Suzi F. Garcia, September 2026
SUZI F. GARCIA is the author of A Homegrown Fairytale (Bone Bouquet, 2020). Her work has been published in places such as Fence, POETRY, Georgia Review, and more.
JENNIFER ESPINOZA is a poet whose work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, 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), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices) and I Don't Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.
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