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Decade of the Brain
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
100 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 2023
3 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Janine Joseph
6 books38 followersJANINE JOSEPH is a poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain (Alice James Books, 2023) and Driving without a License (2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024), an anthology of poetry and statement of poetics. Her commissioned works for the Houston Grand Opera, Washington Master Chorale, and Symphony New Hampshire include "Extraordinary Motion: Concerto for Electric Harp," "The Art of Our Healers," "What Wings They Were," "'On This Muddy Water': Voices from the Houston Ship Channel," and "From My Mother’s Mother". A MacDowell Fellow, Janine is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech and a co-organizer for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that supports poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the U.S.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 2, 2024
17 January 2023
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
“The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around,” quipped Thomas Edison, and he was, of course, right. The brain is the all of us, no matter what we might tell ourselves: brain death is the only true death there is, losing one’s mind the only ailment for which we have no Virgil to guide us through hell. In a godless world, the brain is what makes us gods: its tender trap of memory, the sensitive jewels of its eyes, the instrument of its ears, its arabesque of suspended nerves.
Ask any ancient what happens when you hit a god, and they’ll answer without pause: the gods hit you right back.
In 2008 the poet Janine Joseph was in a terrific car accident, hit from behind and altered forever. The Decade of the Brain, her new book of poetry composed over the titular years, is the product of fulfilling what Edison called her body’s chief function.
It is meandering, challenging to read and challenging to absorb, and intentionally so: It is the recounting of a nightmare and, like all the morning-after retelling of dreams, doesn’t always line up cleanly. Joseph is what Hitchcock and the FBI call an unreliable narrator, not by default of character but a defect in the machinery. The poetry here does not so much transcend the author but step to her side.
If the brain is all we are then it makes sense that, even in autobiography, the self of the author stands outside the self of the subject, when we become even to ourselves abstract. Yes, Janine Joseph created “Decade of the Brain,” but is not the Janine whose story is told in these pages, because every day we become new people, and in the author’s case her brain was rattled around its pan to elevate her even further firmly into the third person.
That it’s written over many years feels obvious: One can feel in its reading the shifts in time and voice in its writing. The style, the substance, the memory evolves. And of course it does; time moves in only one direction. We can never go back. And Decade of the Brain raises a question, here, that it does not necessarily answer: What obligation do we have to all the people we used to be?
If, at times, the work feels effortful it's because, well, it is; healing takes time. Poetry takes time. The author, after all, has had to write 40 poems while carrying a brain around.
The synapses do not always connect, and the sparks sometimes misfire in a way that’s intentional and, if one can describe the after-effects of a traumatic brain injury this way, delightful. 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.
No one else could create this. Yes, she dives into common troubles that all those with medical ailments know, struggling to be comprehended by herself, by her doctors (she began feeling/she apparently suffered/she is however she offers in reductions of doctors’ statements) but also the uncommon: No genre exists, to our knowledge, of brain trauma-induced poetry.
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery,” wrote Virginia Woolf—"always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
Janine Joseph, writing of Janine, answers: It’s for poetry.
It is a work to be read closely, nearer, at times, to visual art than literary, with both linear illustrations and unusual poetic forms and shapes. The old logic holds that the best classical musicians make the best jazz composers; you need to understand the whole of the pieces to reassemble them. So it makes sense, here, that a poet can take the prose of life and break it down into pieces, the way she too has been, palpably, reimagined. Decade of the Brain is 84 pages of elaborate metaphor wrapped around a body. An inky caduceus. It is trim. It is intentional. It is all neurons, and it is, in the end, all nerve.
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
“The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around,” quipped Thomas Edison, and he was, of course, right. The brain is the all of us, no matter what we might tell ourselves: brain death is the only true death there is, losing one’s mind the only ailment for which we have no Virgil to guide us through hell. In a godless world, the brain is what makes us gods: its tender trap of memory, the sensitive jewels of its eyes, the instrument of its ears, its arabesque of suspended nerves.
Ask any ancient what happens when you hit a god, and they’ll answer without pause: the gods hit you right back.
In 2008 the poet Janine Joseph was in a terrific car accident, hit from behind and altered forever. The Decade of the Brain, her new book of poetry composed over the titular years, is the product of fulfilling what Edison called her body’s chief function.
It is meandering, challenging to read and challenging to absorb, and intentionally so: It is the recounting of a nightmare and, like all the morning-after retelling of dreams, doesn’t always line up cleanly. Joseph is what Hitchcock and the FBI call an unreliable narrator, not by default of character but a defect in the machinery. The poetry here does not so much transcend the author but step to her side.
If the brain is all we are then it makes sense that, even in autobiography, the self of the author stands outside the self of the subject, when we become even to ourselves abstract. Yes, Janine Joseph created “Decade of the Brain,” but is not the Janine whose story is told in these pages, because every day we become new people, and in the author’s case her brain was rattled around its pan to elevate her even further firmly into the third person.
That it’s written over many years feels obvious: One can feel in its reading the shifts in time and voice in its writing. The style, the substance, the memory evolves. And of course it does; time moves in only one direction. We can never go back. And Decade of the Brain raises a question, here, that it does not necessarily answer: What obligation do we have to all the people we used to be?
If, at times, the work feels effortful it's because, well, it is; healing takes time. Poetry takes time. The author, after all, has had to write 40 poems while carrying a brain around.
The synapses do not always connect, and the sparks sometimes misfire in a way that’s intentional and, if one can describe the after-effects of a traumatic brain injury this way, delightful. 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.
No one else could create this. Yes, she dives into common troubles that all those with medical ailments know, struggling to be comprehended by herself, by her doctors (she began feeling/she apparently suffered/she is however she offers in reductions of doctors’ statements) but also the uncommon: No genre exists, to our knowledge, of brain trauma-induced poetry.
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery,” wrote Virginia Woolf—"always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
Janine Joseph, writing of Janine, answers: It’s for poetry.
It is a work to be read closely, nearer, at times, to visual art than literary, with both linear illustrations and unusual poetic forms and shapes. The old logic holds that the best classical musicians make the best jazz composers; you need to understand the whole of the pieces to reassemble them. So it makes sense, here, that a poet can take the prose of life and break it down into pieces, the way she too has been, palpably, reimagined. Decade of the Brain is 84 pages of elaborate metaphor wrapped around a body. An inky caduceus. It is trim. It is intentional. It is all neurons, and it is, in the end, all nerve.
January 14, 2023
ABECEDURIAN
for Aba
Bourdain, in the rerun, says the king of fruit’s Camembert-like
custard smells of sun-spoilt death, but the phrase she recalls is
dead grandmother, which bites my tongue. How does anyone forget
ever eating, ever excavating from the pale lobes of the foie gras
fruit, she gasps. We finish the rest of our attachment with this mis-
giving, googling images of thorned husks bisected like my own
human brain. Impossible, to her, to sample, then overwrite the funk.
Impossible, to her, that the Janine I was was ram-rattled into the
Janine I am now. When the concussion receded, I journeyed across
kame and kettle in my habit of skin, immigrant again in this after
life of a life without my grandmother tongue. In Lake Lillian I pressed
my forehead, but nothing natural bore me. I dub her monochrome
now with noise. Ang Doktora, Principe Te-
ñoso, Anak
ng Kidlat — her whole
oeuvre voiced over with what I have left. How does anyone forget?
Pollen-yellow, the odious pulp I can’t qualify on my taste buds. How
quick my mouth went dry. At the reunion, we extend the butterfly leaf,
reminisce around the table, and in all my stories she is a monolingual
sitcom grandma. When I sketch the time she didn’t know it was me
telephoning, I flush with my hands two fluencies, the punch line
undermined. Even their memories, my memory devours into this
vanisher language. How does anyone do anything, I stop asking
when I board the plane. In this life, I exist awake until the altitude change
exhumes me. Where did she go, where did I go in that rest. I’ve heard it’s
xenoglossy, what happened next: I heard through the pane, faint as
zodiacal light, her voice in the air beyond where the body went down.
for Aba
Bourdain, in the rerun, says the king of fruit’s Camembert-like
custard smells of sun-spoilt death, but the phrase she recalls is
dead grandmother, which bites my tongue. How does anyone forget
ever eating, ever excavating from the pale lobes of the foie gras
fruit, she gasps. We finish the rest of our attachment with this mis-
giving, googling images of thorned husks bisected like my own
human brain. Impossible, to her, to sample, then overwrite the funk.
Impossible, to her, that the Janine I was was ram-rattled into the
Janine I am now. When the concussion receded, I journeyed across
kame and kettle in my habit of skin, immigrant again in this after
life of a life without my grandmother tongue. In Lake Lillian I pressed
my forehead, but nothing natural bore me. I dub her monochrome
now with noise. Ang Doktora, Principe Te-
ñoso, Anak
ng Kidlat — her whole
oeuvre voiced over with what I have left. How does anyone forget?
Pollen-yellow, the odious pulp I can’t qualify on my taste buds. How
quick my mouth went dry. At the reunion, we extend the butterfly leaf,
reminisce around the table, and in all my stories she is a monolingual
sitcom grandma. When I sketch the time she didn’t know it was me
telephoning, I flush with my hands two fluencies, the punch line
undermined. Even their memories, my memory devours into this
vanisher language. How does anyone do anything, I stop asking
when I board the plane. In this life, I exist awake until the altitude change
exhumes me. Where did she go, where did I go in that rest. I’ve heard it’s
xenoglossy, what happened next: I heard through the pane, faint as
zodiacal light, her voice in the air beyond where the body went down.
April 30, 2023
normally I do a poetry collection over 1-2 sittings but I took about a month with this one b/c it was intense but holy shit what a book, what a book! The build of reverse of volume to the end, goosebumps all the way
June 7, 2024
Not for me tbh, but the final poem was nice!
Read
April 25, 2023Notables 2023 #21
September 7, 2023
A collection of poems about identity, what it means to be an American, trauma, recovery, and survival.
from Spelled Like Canine: "Mold in / my maw, I seize and sip my breath // until we are done though no one holds me down. / Nights now my incisors shift and days // my chew clicks, sorry / I am not for the impression I bit."
from Airbag Aria: "Picture burnt rubber hurtled through red. That's all / I remember. Nothing and nothing but the narrative // I've shaped of it. Of the holiday, nothing, and nothing // of the route the firefighters pried in rescue."
from The Night Before You are Naturalized: "we practice and ordinary life. Fresh off my flight, / you ask if I have eaten, and I ask you if you are hungry / and we pull into the lot of the nearest restaurant / that has something for you and something for me."
from Spelled Like Canine: "Mold in / my maw, I seize and sip my breath // until we are done though no one holds me down. / Nights now my incisors shift and days // my chew clicks, sorry / I am not for the impression I bit."
from Airbag Aria: "Picture burnt rubber hurtled through red. That's all / I remember. Nothing and nothing but the narrative // I've shaped of it. Of the holiday, nothing, and nothing // of the route the firefighters pried in rescue."
from The Night Before You are Naturalized: "we practice and ordinary life. Fresh off my flight, / you ask if I have eaten, and I ask you if you are hungry / and we pull into the lot of the nearest restaurant / that has something for you and something for me."
May 19, 2023
Captivated by the speaker, I read this sophomore collection examining the brain and the body, family, home, and identity in one sitting with a don’t-talk-to-me expression on my face. It features a naturalized U.S. citizen who, rear-ended in 2008, experiences memory loss, tinnitus, and additional symptoms following a concussion. Some jolting sentences haunt me, calling me back to the book. From “Coup-Contrecoup”: “She could not tell you where I was though / the depths were in her.” And in “The Specialists”: “At home, I fell the foundation of me.” After the final poem, I immediately scribbled Joseph’s debut Driving Without a License onto my TBR list.
from “Reflecting on Winter’s Poetry” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/winter-poetry-20...
from “Reflecting on Winter’s Poetry” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/winter-poetry-20...
July 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews