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All inquiries: Emily Marquis, Alice James Books
* Featured in The New York Times
* Starred Review in Shelf Awareness
* Featured in Poets & Writers, “Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin”
* Featured in Ms. Magazine, “Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of the Last Year”
* Featured in LitHub, “The Annotated Nightstand: What Hanif Abdurraqib is Reading Now and Next”
* Featured in Book Riot, “Reflecting on Winter’s Poetry”
* Featured in Book Riot, “10 of the Best Disability Books of 2023”
* Included in “Start Here” by The Sealey Challenge
“Along the stunningly crafted and radiant syntax of Decade of the Brain: Poems, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“These inventive poems pack a punch.”
“Decade of the Brain is a triumphant, unsettling document of polyphony and synesthesia. Why do we need this poetry now? The poems…reside at the intersection of powerful currents. The collection is an authoritative feminist statement and an immigrant’s story. It advocates for the 18% of Americans living with visible and non-visible forms of disability. It reminds us all that, inevitably, we will be made vulnerable to power structures and that it behooves us to use the wisdom of our empathy to hold power structures accountable when, where, and while we can.”
“...Decade of the Brain tracks the agony, bewilderment, and repetitiveness of traumatic brain injury and its long aftermath. Using invented forms and typographies, the poems speak as though directly from the brain, as well as about it, observing the remaking of memories and the selves that have multiplied in recovery from a car accident...”
“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.”
“We enter Joseph’s latest work with a reminder that the poem is a kind of technology, a durable record. ... Against the assault of misinformation and assumptions about our own humanity, how can we center the self? How do we safely enter the record? It’s these questions that turn us again toward the poem as an exploratory vessel.”
“Great poems are those that create a physical reaction in a reader, and whose lines are remembered for hours, days, and years later. These poems definitely hit that mark.”
“A self alienated from itself—how can it not speak a fractured language? Creating that language is the real achievement of Decade of the Brain. The collection is bursting with strategies and eccentric beauty.”
Cover art: Michelle Blade // Cover Design: DCDESIGN
Available in paperback and e-book formats from Alice James Books and your favorite Booksellers.
* Winner, 2018 da Vinci Eye Award
* Winner, 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize
* Honorable Mention, 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize (New England Poetry Club)
* Finalist, 2018 Eric Hoffer Award
* Finalist, 2017 Oklahoma Book Award
* Longlist Finalist, 2016 Julie Suk Award
* Profiled by Stephanie Burt in The Los Angeles Times
* Named an "11 Immigrant Authors Who Are Transforming Literature" title in Bustle Magazine.
* Named an "Immigrant Authors are Making American Literature Great Again: 12 of the Best Books of 2016" title in VICE magazine
* Named an "Editors' Picks for Best Books of 2016" title by Pleiades
* Named a 2018 “Favorite Debut Poetry Collection” by Indiana Review
* Late Night Library's August 2016 Book Club Selection
* Reviewed in Publishers Weekly
* Featured on NBC News' list of emerging Asian-American writers to read
*Named a spring 2016 "Don't-Miss" poetry title by Library Journal
* Selected as a “Top Poetry Pick for spring 2016” by Library Journal
* Selected as a must-read book for 2016 by Brooklyn Magazine
PRAISE for Driving without a license
“If you come to Driving without a License for immigrant stories, family stories, childhood stories, Filipina stories and coming-of-age stories, you will find them, transformed by a fast-forward imagination…. If you want to see formal variety or syntactic verve, you’ll find them too, at almost every imaginable speed. If you want acerbic commentary on the American immigration apparatus, on a culture that says she belongs and yet doesn’t belong, you’ll find that too: If Joseph ever has a child, she quips, ‘my child/ will be called an anchor/ with hands at its throat.’ (The brutality of the mixed metaphor helps make her point.) You’ll also find lighter language play and even puns: ‘Extended Stay America.’ […] But you'll find rare intelligence about what its like to tell just part of your story, to know that no life can be wholly explained or revealed, that something of her story — of anyone’s story — will always remain to be told.” [Stephanie Burt, The Los Angeles Times]
"Through her variety of lines, of old and new forms, and of voices adopted and inhabited, Joseph, herself Filipina-American, does justice to the raw emotions around immigration with verve...." [Publishers Weekly]
"...Driving without a License explores liminal spaces inhabited by an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines coming of age in the United States. Witnessing how the speaker must hide a part of her identity, we learn how one language’s term for “always hiding” translates to another’s “TNT.” Driving without a License is political and virtuosic while maintaining a witty and down-to-earth voice, and the finely wrought tension between these modes creates a uniquely energized poetry." [Laura Donnelly, Kenyon Review]
“Joseph’s work weaves her own truths and luminous stories within today’s anti-immigrant and racist contexts. And by so doing, she helps us become clearer on the work we must do to shape this world into a different story we all can tell.” [Tamiko Beyer, LitHub]
"One has come to expect quality from Alice James Books. The venerable New England cooperative continues to publish the best new female voices while expanding their catalogue in recent years to include men and even more international poets. That expectation of quality has been met and exceeded with Janine Joseph’s Driving without a License, which sluices down hot asphalt, gathering steam in the low air. At times steamy but never foggy (the way some poems repeat the worst excesses of the Imagistes), these poems elucidate rather than obscure." [Josh A. Brewer, The Southeast Review]
"These poems create a disquieting narrative of American immigration, one in which an undocumented young woman from the Philippines hides in plain sight among the pizza places and schoolyards of Southern California, surrounded by opportunity, risk and threat. Joseph’s sensibility is as psychological as it is political, reminding us that concealment is more than a physical act; it is also a profoundly disruptive emotional and psychological position, one that informs not just the speaker’s sense of the world, but her sense of her self. Brilliantly crafted and intimate, Driving without a License complicates the narrative of American immigration, creating from it a poetry of beauty and empathy." [Kevin Prufer]
"When I first heard her poems two years ago, I knew how vital they were to the conversations about who can claim American identity. Since then, the scapegoating and outright vitriol directed toward immigrants has only grown, making her debut collection even more essential on anyone’s American poetry shelf." [Swati Khurana, The Rumpus]
"As she guides us through constant fearfulness...and unimaginable hurt..., Joseph blends everyday anxieties with deeper ones, avoiding outright reportage for smarter inflection. The tensions of visiting the immigration lawyer’s office, for instance, are seen in the mad drive away. VERDICT: A gifted writer’s view on an all-American issue." [Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal]
"Janine Joseph writes with an open and easy intimacy. The language here is at once disruptive and familiar, political and sensual, and tinged by the melancholy of loss and the discomforting radiance of redemption. A strong debut." [Chris Abani]
"We’ve never read a book like Janine Joseph’s, Driving without a License. By “We” I mean all of us. With its ferocious formal range and deep compassion Joseph shows us the world we all live in but often choose to ignore. Here are the lives of mothers and fathers, teenagers and grandparents, all living under the threat of deportation. Here are people making a new home while holding onto the dignity and beauty of the place that they were once from. Joseph is that rare poet who makes a poem that devastates a reader while being entirely free from judgment. These are political poems because simply being alive in the United States is a political act. These are narrative poems because everyone has a story. At the heart of each poem is the lyric, that moment in which there is no separation between ourselves and the world Joseph lets bloom. This makes us citizens of these poems, which is a testament to Joseph’s staggering grace." [Gabrielle Calvocoressi]
"Though the political suffuses these poems, they are also personal, funny, irreverent and playful. Difficult forms such as the villanelle and a linked sonnet cycle are treated deftly and courageously, while the diction runs the gamut from Tagalog to American pop culture. These are inviting, personable poems with sharp points buried in each. A truly entertaining and enlightening first collection." [D. A. Powell, Goodreads]
"Janine Joseph’s 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize-winning Driving without a License can be examined through a number of lenses that help give it unity: politically as it details the life of an undocumented young woman from the Philippines who hides in the light of the Southern California sunshine; formally as Joseph weaves in a sonnet sequence, a villanelle, a ghazal among long-lined poems that stretch to fit in American pop culture and her Filipina roots; emotionally as the speaker copes with the growing pains we all face as we search for our identities. They all work to give us direction, but they’re not the center. If we take that first word from the book’s epigraph (“Home”) and the last poem’s final word (“disappeared”), Driving Without a License becomes even greater than the sum of its parts." [Michael Levan. American Microreviews & Interviews]
"The book includes text from naturalization forms and newspaper articles about immigration, plays with multiple forms and lays claim to each. While the speaker is hiding in plain sight, the book is a 'coming out' that doesn't shy away from its politics." [Matthew Salesses, VICE]
"Propelled by the topic of immigration and filled with heartbreaking relevance, the book still manages to treat the subject with a unique sense of humor that feels wholly appropriate. Courage and a side-glancing wit unite, making Joseph’s collection a necessity." [Steve Fellner, Rain Taxi]
"Driving without a License is a collection about belonging and un-belonging, about growing up in a culture that says you’re welcome here (generally), yet enables governmental structures designed to alienate and remove you." [E. CE Miller, Bustle Magazine]