Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible - by Rebecca Lindenberg (Paperback)

About the Book

"Living in landscapes of ruin and ruination, memory and problematic nostalgia, Rebecca Lindenberg's Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible plumbs the depths of disruption, decay, and how we go on when the world stops cold. Inspired by the speaker's experiences of living with type 1 diabetes, the collection chronicles humanity's daily fight for survival in a world that's bent on destroying itself. Lindenberg centers love, self-acceptance, and intimacy as incomparable balms across great geographical and psychological distances, and asks the reader to do the impossible: hope"--

Book Synopsis

Living in landscapes of ruin and ruination, memory and problematic nostalgia, Rebecca Lindenberg's Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible plumbs the depths of disruption, decay, and how we go on when the world stops cold. Inspired by the speaker's experiences of living with type 1 diabetes, the collection chronicles humanity's daily fight for survival in a world that's bent on destroying itself.

Lindenberg centers love, self-acceptance, and intimacy as incomparable balms across great geographical and psychological distances, and asks the reader to do the impossible: hope.

Review Quotes

"Brimming with muscular lines that careen from vibrant lyrics to vulnerable narratives, these exquisite poems are what this world desperately needs. Lindenberg's powerful poetic skills blaze on every page, and at its core, this book is driven by a brilliant beating heart opening again and again. I love this book." -- Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States

"Given the lateness of the hour, it is long past the time when Apocalypse ought intimately to possess an idiom of its own. Like everything intimate, this will take its shape from a human body pronounced upon the body of the world. Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible proposes a beautifully reckless incarnation--suddenly idiomatic, fleshed and tireless. With the authority of love offered and accepted, Lindenberg confides Apocalypse to our common, perishing world." -- Donald Revell, author of Drought-Adapted Vine

About the Author

Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of three poetry collections, Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, 2024), The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014), winner of the Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index (McSweeney's, 2012). She's the recipient of an Amy Lowell Scholarship for Traveling Poets, a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.