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
