"There are few writers as attuned to the potential of metaphor as Jennifer Espinoza, whose poems make this gesture something more like alchemy. From the first poem, where a trans woman stopped by the TSA blooms into a cloud of energy, Espinoza's poems enact a radical, surrealist, transmutation; her strange, dream-like recollections are spaces of un- and re-making, herself and the world. I Don't Want To Be Understood is simply a triumph--virtuosic, heartbreaking, and searing in its social critiques."
--torrin a. greathouse

"I Don't Want to Be Understood is a blistering and a balm. Its speaker holds inside herself the garden, lush, the attending rot, seed and bloom, and the desire to be tended and tenderly so. Alongside the garden, Espinoza charts the cosmology of a woman come into herself in a world of violence, a world that would undo the wonder of this speaker. I leave this book deeply moved by Espinoza's insistence on nurturing a green hope, a green heart."
--Donika Kelly

"The potent and focused fourth collection from Espinoza (There Should Be Flowers) captures the danger, mental strain, and transcendence of a trans woman's experience. ... At times devastating, at times chilling, this volume expresses an exhilarating defiance."
--Publishers Weekly