PRAISE FOR JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

“Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s book, I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It., is a book that makes us “feel everything.” It’s an absolute celebration of the self, with a persona who embraces pure emotion and feels everything immensely just to make sure we will, too. A persona that unabashedly tells us, “i am sad/but i don’t want to talk about being sad./ i’m going to talk about being happy” because “life/ is fuckin’ beautiful!” Cathartic and brilliant, Espinoza’s genius shines in this book as a shapeshifter set on a soul’s journey that only ever ends up in a state of pure bliss and exhilaration for the gift of being. “ ‘thank you for letting me be alive,’/ i whisper/ to no one in particular” this book sings to us, except in fact, we are listening for its whisper and its yell, gratefully, hungrily taking in its holy aura. I really love this book and I know you will, too. “

-Dorothea Lasky, ROME and Milk

“Wise and brimming with feeling, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s work seems to emerge from the other side of revelation. Her poems, that is, do not reveal but know that the body is both a dead-end and a site of possibility. That language is a necessary violence that makes and unmakes us. That the unbearable must be borne. In this newly expanded edition of her first collection, Espinoza reminds us that hers is an essential voice issuing from “the edges of what it means to have a body,” to be a person, but nonetheless tangled in the terrible, beautiful fact of being alive.”

-Cam Awkward-Rich, Sympathetic Little Monster

“Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's poetry, like all my favorite poetry, takes chaos to the potter's wheel until it is the mug we can drink from for an ecstatic life without disguise. ‘i want to be all of the things i am / all at once until i die.’ Who needs priests! Poets show us the way to finding our own private god, and this book is my new bible!”

• CAConrad, While Standing in Line for Death and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

"Espinoza’s gift is her use of exquisite language and arresting images to capture this contradiction of self-destruction and resilience that lurks inside us, a piercing glance that is compassionate, but not pitying, into physicality of trans women’s lives."

 -Autostraddle

"Among many things, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's poetry explores desire, the reality of living within the confines of the human body, and queer strength. Identity in her poems is in constant negotiation between the self and the world, and is at times seen as both liberating and binding. One way in which the speaker understands being queer is by seeing it as a place of mid-invention, a space where the everyday becomes ceremonial, political, and stylized."

 -Them.

"[Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's] poems are flawless in their directness, and wonderfully imperfect in their human-ness."

 -Up the Staircase Quarterly