UC poet’s timely collection of verse inspires

Rebecca Lindenberg is no stranger to isolation. As a poet, essayist, translator and literary editor, much of her writing, she says, is done in solitude, alone in a room at a desk, with very little idea of whether what she is working on will resonate with audiences and readers. 

Ironically, her current project, a poetry collection with the lead poem titled “A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse,” is “perhaps feeling a bit too on-the-nose now,” she says, as the world deals with the ongoing devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Her project, however, says Lindenberg, assistant professor and creative writing director in the University of Cincinnati’s Department of English, is not about doom. “Rather, it’s about reminding ourselves that for many, the world has “ended” (personally, collectively) in many ways, many times, but we have as cultures, peoples and individuals, proven ourselves to be resilient and resourceful and found ways to recover and rebuild and persist.” 

The title poem appears to be apropos to global events but was originally published in the Southern Indiana Review in 2018 and then later republished in the 2019 Best American Poetry anthology. The initial work on the collection was supported by a $55,000 grant from the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, which is a bequest from the estate of poet Amy Lowell and awarded to either one or two poets per year, nationwide. Many of the poems to be included in the book have been published in magazines and journals, but Lindenberg says she continues to work on contributions to the collection with the support of a $5,000 grant recently received from the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for poetry. 

“Awards like this don’t just provide funds for the actual work, but they also provide positive reinforcement — a way of the award committee saying, ‘Yes, it’s worth it. Keep at it.’”