Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

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.

Table of Contents:
To My Insulin Pump A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse The Woodpecker Spiel: A Love Poem On Memory Studies from Childhood The Grape Arbor Birch Elevator Bird of Paradise Tanbark Greased Melon Day Bottle Brush Bees Black Mamba Lamb’s Ear Juniper Issues Oleander Rose Watering Sequoia Showing 615 Results for “Diabetes”12/30/19-12/30/21 He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words (FromMy House) II. Failing at Epilogue in San Telmo Flea Market Chronic Illness Imagined as a Haunting Andean Pastoral Ode to Anthony Bourdain Sacsayhuamán Imaginary Prisons Reverse-Engineering Their Sacrifice At Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive Mood Blood Magic The Beelitz Heilstätten Drinking at Szimpla with Emily and Laurel Sligo Abbey Ohio I Ask Him to Send Me Some Words (ReadingThe Florida Handbook) III. Discourses of Diabetes Care Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible Diagnosis Clockwork Girl Notes on the Impossible The Impossible Body How the First of Many Burnouts Begins Short Essay on Failure Notes on Feelings of Failure Short Essay On Those I Do Not Want to Fail Magic Words The Splendid Body To Gather Stones Together Some Further Notes on the Impossible Elegy for my Car, Wrecked on the Cape Highway Within Productions of Failure An Aspirational Introduction to a Poem at a Reading He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words (Here inHis Garden)

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 IndexShe is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.

Review :
“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