Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

by Rebecca Lindenberg

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 hope.

Genres: Poetry

123 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

Rebecca Lindenberg earned a BA from the College of William & Mary and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. Her essays and criticism have appeared widely, and she has been a guest blogger for the Best American Poetry Blog. Her collection of poetry, Love, An Index (2012), focuses on her relationship with her partner, the poet Craig Arnold; Terrance Hayes described the poems as a “litany of losses and retrievals” that “remake the elegy form.” Her second book, The Logan Notebooks (Center for Literary Publishing, 2014) won the 2015 Utah Book Award.

Lindenberg’s honors include an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a MacDowell Colony Residency, and a fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about a dozen poetry collections a year, and I'm pleased if I like even three or four poems in any given book. It's a treasure hunt! But Lindenberg's collection is a trove. I stopped trying to bookmark my favorite poems when I realized the spine wouldn't be able to handle it. Though many of the poems are about the poet's chronic illness (diabetes), it's not a pity party. Though there are poems about struggle, there are also poems of tenacity and triumph. The poems range from the light--describing a sting as "bee-branded, bumble-shocked, butt-needled"--to the heavy, such as the dread of discovering what being diabetic would mean during the Covid-19 pandemic. It's a roller coaster, but one I would gladly ride again and again.

Excerpt from the title poem:

The Splendid Body

The splendid body is meat, flexor
and flesh pumping, pulling, anti-
gravity maverick just standing
upright all over museums and
in line for the bus and in the laundry
aisle where it's just standing there
smelling all the detergent like
it's not big deal. So what if a couple
of its squishy parts are suspended
within, like a beach-bungled jellyfish
in a shelved jar, not doing anything?