Decade of the Brain: Poems - by Janine Joseph (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident. The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recover-physically and mentally-in the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when "before" crosses into "after." Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self"--

Book Synopsis

In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident.

The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recover--physically and mentally--in the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when "before" crosses into "after." Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self.

After the accident I turned out

all of the lights in the room while I watched,

concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a fever

with nothing on the tip of my tongue.

Review Quotes

Winner of the 2024 Virginia Literary Award for Poetry
Recommended by The New York Times "Newly Published"
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's "Page One"
Recommended by Book Riot

"In this stunning collection, Janine Joseph illustrates for us how to build the self after immense trauma. What remains and what must be transfigured? The self here is the red-blooded body, the brown body, the existential I. We are guided through by the poultice of memory, sound, and the lean and absolute power of the line."

--Sarah Gambito

"Janine Joseph is a virtuoso of refraction and reflection, resisting metaphor in favor of immediate and vivid description in this remarkable account of a life-changing injury and the effort to recover memory, language, self. Formally inventive, these poems stay awake to the complexities of the human mind even in the midst of recovery from trauma, the way words are always slippery and elusive when we need them most to be solid objects. A fascinating, moving collection."
--D.A. Powell

"Along the stunningly crafted and radiant syntax of Decade of the Brain, I edge the edges of languages, bodies, selfhood, and estrangement, into experiences of disorientation. Joseph's speakers articulate the strangeness of living in relation to other past and simultaneous selves changed by injury, intimacy, notions of citizenship, and nation. Each line is a shock of words, then an unraveling. Dense with expansive, precise sound, this book is a stunning grappling with the possibility and powers of an irreconcilable self."
--Aracelis Girmay

"In a time when traumatic brain injury and cognitive impairment are still heavily stigmatized, Joseph uses her poetry to describe the scrambled mind and memory loss."
--Kendra Winchester, Book Riot

"Decade of the Brain is a deeply intelligent, often sensory, book about the demanding act of healing, of reorientation, of getting through--be it injury, trauma, immigration, or love: "I hear the seeds I planted are birds now," Joseph writes in "Tell Me of Paradise." And what more could one ask for but to witness such metamorphosis."
--Nicole Lachat, Southern Indiana Review

"Through formal variety and with thematic intensity, [Joseph] ruminates on her protracted recovery from a traumatic car accident and her journey to U.S. citizenship. ... These inventive poems pack a punch."
--Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review

"Decade of the Brain resides at the intersection of powerful currents. The collection is an authoritative feminist statement and an immigrant's story. It advocates for the 18 percent of Americans who live with visible and nonvisible disabilities. It reminds us all that, inevitably, we will be made vulnerable by power structures, and it behooves us to think of the wisdom of our empathy to hold power structures accountable when, where, and while we can."
--Benjamin Landry, VerseCurious Podcast

"Janine Joseph's Decade of the Brain tracks the agony, bewilderment, and repetitiveness of traumatic brain injury and its long aftermath."
--Cindy Juyoung Ok, Harriet Books

"Joseph effectively instills a sense of frustration and desperation in the reader that is palpable. She writes of an experience, thought, or memory, and then questions it. Psychologically, the reader is taken through these ups and downs in memories with her."
--Holly Cian, West Trade Review

"It's the mark of the ability of Joseph--an intelligent and careful author--that she is able to paint a portrait of insufficiency so sufficiently. It's the poetry of the beginning of days and the poetry of the ends of days, that first half hour and last half hour of the day are hardest to see, as we wipe the sleep from our eyes and then, again, struggle to keep them open, spending all that time at home but unfocused."
--B.A. Van Sise, New York Journal of Books.

About the Author

Janine Joseph is a formerly undocumented poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain and Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and da Vinci Eye award, finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, and named an Honorable Mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She is a;sp co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, 2024). Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including Newsweek, The Nation, The Atlantic, Orion, Poets & Writers, Poem-a-Day, and the Smithsonian's "What It Means to Be American" project. Her commissioned works for Symphony New Hampshire, Washington Master Chorale, and the Houston Grand Opera include Extraordinary Motion: Concerto for Electric Harp, The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, On This Muddy Water, and From My Mother's Mother. Since 2016, she has organized for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that advocates for poets who are currently or who were formally undocumented in the U.S. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Bread Loaf, she is also a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. Janine is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. Learn more at www.janinejoseph.com