Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

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.

“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

• To My Insulin PumpA Brief History of the FutureApocalypseThe WoodpeckerSpiel: A Love PoemOn MemoryStudies from ChildhoodThe Grape Arbor Birch Elevator Bird of ParadiseTanbarkGreased Melon Day Bottle Brush Bees Black MambaLamb’s EarJuniper Issues Oleander Rose Watering SequoiaShowing 615 Results for “Diabetes”12/30/19-12/30/21He Asks Me to Send Him SomeWords (FromMy House)II.Failing at Epilogue in SanTelmo Flea MarketChronic Illness Imagined as aHauntingAndean PastoralOde to Anthony BourdainSacsayhuamánImaginary PrisonsReverse-Engineering TheirSacrificeAt Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive MoodBlood MagicThe Beelitz HeilstättenDrinkingat Szimpla with Emilyand LaurelSligo AbbeyOhioI Ask Him to Send Me SomeWords (ReadingThe Florida Handbook)III.Discourses of Diabetes CareOur Splendid Failure to Do theImpossible DiagnosisClockwork GirlNotes on the ImpossibleThe Impossible BodyHow the First of Many BurnoutsBeginsShort Essay on FailureNotes on Feelings of FailureShort Essay On Those I Do NotWant to FailMagic WordsThe Splendid BodyTo Gather Stones TogetherSome Further Notes on theImpossibleElegy for my Car, Wrecked onthe Cape HighwayWithinProductions of FailureTable of Contents: AnAspirationalIntroduction to a Poem at aReadingHe Asks Me to Send Him SomeWords (Here inHis Garden)