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Start giftingDecade of the Brain: Poems
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Learn moreIn 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.
Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist born in the Philippines. She is the author of Driving Without a License, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize and 2018 da Vinci Eye award, finalist for the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award, and named an Honorable Mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poetry, essays, and critical work have appeared in The Nation, The Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, The Atlantic, Pleiades, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Zócalo Public Square, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from MacDowell, Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bethany Arts Community, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. A co-organizer for Undocupoets, Janine is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University
Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist born in the Philippines. She is the author of Driving Without a License, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize and 2018 da Vinci Eye award, finalist for the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award, and named an Honorable Mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poetry, essays, and critical work have appeared in The Nation, The Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, The Atlantic, Pleiades, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Zócalo Public Square, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from MacDowell, Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bethany Arts Community, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. A co-organizer for Undocupoets, Janine is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University
Reviews
Recommended by The New York Times "Newly Published"
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's "Page One"
"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.