Decade of the Brain: Poems

"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