I don't want to be understood
Publication Information
New Gloucester, Maine : Alice James Books, [2024]
Physical Description
79 pages ; 23 cm
Summary
"A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet's life. I Don't Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in order to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination. These poems stretch from childhood to the present day-resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth-and instead ask what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. I Don't Want To Be Understood is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place"--
Contents
- 1. violence is the scroll upon which her history is recorded. airport ritual
- every day
- personal statement
- every morning i walk through a field
- makeup ritual
- questions for your admirer
- the heat death of the universe
- the threat
- as he killed me i imagined him
- i want to write a poem
- return to light
- warm
- birthday suits
- coming out
- to my parents
- snow
- particulate matter
- my freedom
- my name
- trans woman's first rental application
- queering success
- you're going to die today
- poem
- the blueness of the room
- the front door
- game animal
- justification
- time-lapse video of trans woman collapsing inward like a dying star
- gangrenous love
- how many colors there are vs. how many colors have been named
- 2. and then came the naming. newsfeed
- poem
- housewife from planet x
- poem
- coercion road
- a confession
- a confession
- childhood prayer
- espinoza:
- poem
- resurrection
- loss ritual
- airport ritual
- normal
- real woman
- where and what i am
- we
- how i make a poem
- your weakness
- today i was alone
- i talked to that spirit again
- this is what makes us worlds
- memoir
- the present
- by the cemetery on pine
- biography of a snowstorm
- addendum
- departure
- it doesn't matter if i'm understood.