Praise for love, an index...
“Love, an Index is an utterly startling, muscular, heartbreaking book—poems pulled into existence by an event anyone who reads them wants only to reverse. Yet facing the irreversible fully, and still finding words, is what poems do. They demonstrate what it is to go on. I wish this book were not here to be read. But it is. And be read it will, with gratitude, stopped breath, amazement.”
—Jane Hirshfield
“Is it Northrop Frye that defines the lyric poet as someone whispering to herself or to a lover, a ghost? These poems enact that sort of intimacy. Prayers, love letters, reveries-- they feel overheard in a way that makes this poet's innovations (as in the title poem or “Illuminating” or “Losing Language: A Phrasebook for Beginners” or “Love, n1.”) feel natural and necessary. Love, an Index is a terrific litany of losses and retrievals. These poems recover, reclaim, remake the elegy form. They give it a soundtrack that is both blue and celebratory and careening at the slant of love. Rebecca Lindenberg's work stuns me.”
—Terrance Hayes
“The poems in Love, an Index, through a kaleidoscope of form and subtle pitch of voice, constitute a chorus. As in a symphony, there are strains and themes and variations, but ultimately there is unity, and here that unity is the sound of a deep soul—speaking, thinking, watching, remembering, but above all, singing. It is a song of plunging grief, a grief almost too low to bear, and the poems stay down, obediently, through the long dreaming night of loss. And then a sun comes up, and the whole book unfolds its wings and quietly rises. This is a dark and beautiful adventure, a terrible journey that strangely comes home to hope. I find this is a humbling and human book of poetry, a book to celebrate.”
—Maurice Manning
“Robert Creeley has long since and helpfully avowed that a poem is the activity of the evidence. Now, with Love, an Index, Rebecca Lindenberg provides an ancillary and most beautiful motive force to that activity, for these are poems whose luminous details and loving candor show the sensorium of their evidence. It has been quite some time since American writing has brought forth a poet of sensibility. Yet surely now, it has done so. In her recklessness, in her acutest sounds, Lindenberg emboldens sensuality to become true sense and truthful understanding. This is a book first to read and then afterward, ever after, to know.”
—Donald Revell
"These poems accomplish—beautifully, fiercely, heartbreakingly—to fix a life into a handful of moments, beyond the flow of eternity. But here Lindenberg’s attention is always drifting beyond the page, to the terrible what-is, the tender what-ifs. Each poem seems to say, This is what we were given, this is what we made, and it must now, somehow, be enough."
—Nick Flynn
"Lindenberg executes her grief in measured, clean lines that speak of more to come… It comes to the point where a single word reaches out and takes the reader by the heart.”
—Weave Magazine
“These poems are heartbreaking, not just because they mourn a lover lost but because they celebrate the enduring presence of a love shared.”
—Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
“An A-to-Z collection of poems that are passionate, plainspoken, elegiac, and lyric as they capture the moments of a life shared.”
—Vanity Fair
“Beautiful and romantic.”
—School Library Journal
"Lindenberg effortlessly creates an egoless world, full of feeling yet devoid of melodrama...A poet of immense power."
—Bin Nguyen, ZYZZYVA
“Love, An Index tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story.”
—The Rumpus
praise for the logan notebooks
"Despite their beauty, Lindenberg's poems do not shy away from humor or pain, as shown through her students, friends, and lovers. A constant is her fascination with sound and the meaning(s) of words. . . . Lindenberg has crafted a collection that is immediately striking, yet thought-provoking beyond its pages—a recipe to rouse even the most callous reader. "
—Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
"The Logan Notebooks has a rough draft feel whilst simultaneously seeming delicately ordered and crafted as a collection. It’s a neat and difficult trick and Lindenberg achieves it via her clever linguistic attunement. Her poetry is casual (notebookesque), but also open to deeper modes of knowing and understanding. . . . The Logan Notebooks is a book lightened by its fervency, by its deceptive buoyancy. To wit, Logan is a town in Utah, near Salt Lake City; per the volume’s back cover, Lindenberg holds a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah, a school located in Salt Lake City. Lindenberg’s poetry thus adheres to the old adage write what you know. Only she knows what we don’t and as readers our pleasure derives from her willingness to share such enlightenment."
—Jeff Alessandrelli, The Rumpus
"How do we remain the same person when our bodies, like everything around us, constantly change? I was reminded of these preoccupations while reading Rebecca Lindenberg’s excellent poetry collection The Logan Notebooks. . . . Lindenberg’s collection is redolent of change, of the changing nature of the world around us, of our relationships to this world and those around us, to our changing identities and the fluidity of language." —David G. Pace, 15 Bytes
"The Logan Notebooks commits itself to the exploration of whole messy strata of emotion. . . . In smashing the idea of authorial distance, Lindenberg crouches down to us, holds out a hand, and does not shy from her experience. She is alive, wild, warm." —Emma Aylor, The Female Gaze
"In The Logan Notebooks, Rebecca Lindenberg offers poems of careful observation, colored by the particular beauties and idiosyncrasies of the town in Utah where the book is set. . . . Her poems also approach the sublime as in 'On a Visit to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels,' in which the winter solstice offers a sight 'Worth the pain in your hand-joints you can only feel in this kind of cold.' In either case, the poems are sensitive to beauty wherever it might be found."
—Sugar House Review
"These poems are intent on calling out the migratory beauty of this world, in a neighbor-voice: friendly, from the yard nearby, pointing out stuff we might not have noticed. They frequently employ that most ancient of forms, the list, to show us what we shine a light on, what we look past, what we reflect, what we miss. In that way, they speak like the meadowlark who says, See you! See you! These poems are for when we shall no longer fear the ecstatic, because we'll know that ecstasy too is quotidian, as daily as a meadowlark's shopping list." —Eleni Sikelianos
"In her second collection, Rebecca Lindenberg turns her scrutiny to the American West without forgetting the many layers of sediment and memory there and in other elsewheres. From grocery stores in Utah to a synagogue in Rome to cloud-gazing everywhere, in poems at turns laconic and lush, wistful and wry, Lindenberg shows how beauty and absurdity can and will persist—even, or especially—in the loss of our multiple loves and multiple selves." —Tarfia Faizullah
"Recursive and elliptical, the poems in Rebecca Lindenberg's The Logan Notebooks are as difficult to depict as they are to forget. Like clouds (themselves, so omnipresent and imperative that Lindenberg confronts them on the first page), these poems shift, then settle into shape, then shift once again. More usual iterations of poetry give way to paragraphs of unimpeachable prose, itemized narratives in which whole, epic plots are cached. Lists run left to right as if they actually listed, like boats off-ballast or stand-alone willows in windstorms. Catalogues are first climactic then cathartic. What she does not write, she has somehow written. Aphorisms become offerings. Almost every line is a sutra. If 'anyone who feels they have to lie' is a thing that has lost its power, then Rebecca Lindenberg need not worry. Neither these poems nor the poet who conceives them flinches at gut-punch truth." —Jill Alexander Essbaum
"The American West, in its mythical and real-time complexity, is 'itched out of reverie' and 'brought into the deep groove of the present' in Rebecca Lindenberg's The Logan Notebooks. The grotesquerie of capitalism hangs in the background, sometimes the foreground, but her lines don't flinch as they 'attend to these/details that might later/divert you.' Above all this is a book about relationships—to a beloved, a family, a landscape, a country, and language itself. 'Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable,' Lindenberg's poems startle life from a fractured world. The Logan Notebooks is a balm and an anomaly."
—Joseph Massey