Decade of the Brain: Poems - Paperback

by Janine Joseph (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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