Decade of the Brain is the second poetry collection from Janine Joseph, born in the Philippines. Through formal variety and with thematic intensity, she ruminates on her protracted recovery from a traumatic car accident and her journey to U.S. citizenship. Joseph (Driving Without a License) is a co-organizer for Undocupoets, a consortium for undocumented immigrant poets and their supporters; her piece "The Night Before You Are Naturalized" recalls when she became a U.S. citizen.
In 2008, a driver rear-ended her vehicle, and Joseph suffered a concussion. It took years to reclaim her concentration and sense of self. In poems like "Janine vs Janine," she refers to herself in second person to communicate her dissociation. The faltering phrases of "Every Good Boy Does Fine" (a mnemonic for musical notes) reflect her aphasia. In "Four Darks in Red," she turns frustration into an alliterative litany: "Bad body is so/ negative. Bad body won't get dressed." She sees a counselor for lingering trauma and tries alternative medicine, including acupuncture and massage, for the "commotion in my cranium."
No two poems are the same. They differ not only in length and form, but also in alignment. For instance, the lines of "My Chiropractor Gives Me a Name" curve down the page much like a spine, while "The Reverse of Volume" repeats each couplet again and again in a staticky overlap. "Erasure," in the burning haibun form, reprints one of her neurological reports and then blacks out most of its text on the following page before reducing it to a final haiku. These inventive poems pack a punch. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck