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.

"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 The best way to hide is in plain sight. In this politically-charged and candid debut, we follow the chronicles of an illegal immigrant speaker over a twenty-year span as she grows up in the foreign and forbidding landscape of America. From "Ivan, Always Hiding": I strained for the socket as you pulled me, my bare legs against your legs in the windowless dark. The room, snuffed out, could have been no larger than a freight car, no smaller than a box van; we couldn't tell anymore, the glints in the shellacked floor, too, were dulled. This is like death, you said, always joking. I slid my head into the crook of your neck, and didn't disagree. Raised in the Philippines and California, Janine Joseph holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her libretto "From My Mother's Mother" was performed as part of the Houston Grand Opera's "Song of Houston: East + West" series. A Kundiman and Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, she is an assistant professor of English at Weber State University.

In James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein, the doctors clumsy assistant, Fritz, reaches for the jar marked "Normal Brain." When he drops that one, he turns to the jar marked "Abnormal Brain." In Abnormal Brain Sonnets, Griffin Prize-winning poet David W. McFadden, now in his sixth decade of writing, reaches once again for the jar labelled "Sonnets" to probe the world around him and the world within him. With humour and poignancy, and a gently philosophical voice, McFadden reaches into his own past to rescue the images and formative influences that have guided his life and thought. He touches, too, on his own diminishing memory and struggle with language resulting from the onset of logopenic aphasia. This lively, unpredictable collection of sonnets concludes with a 2005 author interview by friend and editor Stuart Ross that explores McFadden's writing life and the role of the poet.

Poetry. "Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile." Thurston Moore "'I wanted to be high, but now I'm trapped in my life.' Frustrated by the limits of his world, PARTYKNIFE's youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. 'Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am.' These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life." Sarah Manguso "PARTYKNIFE is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren't allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, 'the future.'" Blake Butler"

Lord Brain is an extended meditation on the psyche (in its double sense of mind and soul) in its relationship to that three-pound bundle in our skull. Bruce Beasley’s collection of thirty-one poems is named for Sir Walter Russell Brain, or Lord Brain (1895-1966), the eminent British neuroscientist and author of Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System. Bringing into conversation the disparate fields of neuroscience, theology, linguistics, particle physics, and theology, these poems investigate in both lyrical and scientific terms the relationship of brain to mind and soul, and of brain to the cosmos and God. Whether discussing cosmology or astrophysics, neurobiology or insect physiology, Lord Brain connects the inner cosmos of our human anatomy with the external forces (material and divine) that brought the cosmos into being.

Collects translations of poems from throughout the author's career, including several new translations, including her entire final collection in English for the first time.

Do you enjoy poetry, and want to hear on a new topic? Have you ever wanted to learn about the brain, but felt bogged down with detail? If so, this is your book! Inside are 80 short and easy to memorize poems for both poetry aficionados and those studying neuroscience.