Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

Availability: In Stock

About This Title

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.

To My Insulin Pump

You’re part of my anatomy now – port,
they call it. Into the flesh of my belly,
I insert a needle. Needle comes out, but
a tiny plastic capillary remains, affixed
to a button. Buoy on the surface of me.
Black, about the size of an old pager,
I wear you clipped to my bra like a spy.
When delivering insulin, I can hear and feel
a faint click-whir, click-whir near my heart,
a cat’s purr. Fine plastic tubing runs from
my pump to my button. Somehow
umbilical. It unclasps with a quick twist
if I want a bath. Or to fuck unobstructed.
It would not be exaggerating to say you
(weight of a deck of cards, cost of a small car)
are literally keeping me alive – but I’ll just say
you, splendid little engine, are the only part
of me I never find it difficult to love.

Praise for Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

“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