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.