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.

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 has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the MacDowell Arts Colony. Poems from the most recent collection appear or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets (ed. Ada Limón), Missouri Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.