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Too Big to Fail

Georgia Faust
POETRY

104 pages
Author photo: Tramaine George
Editor: Jay Ritchie
ISBN 9781988355054
Spring 2017

if the world were a nice place
everything would already be born

Capitalism’s absurd logic and inevitable deadly conclusions dictate the tone and voice of Georgia Faust’s ambitious, cerebral, and eerie debut. Tracing economic, architectural, and ecological disasters through the streets of New York City, language itself requires new forms and formulations as it attempts to relay the damage. Teeming with urban imagery and uncanny leaps of thought, this poetry collection is a one-of-a-kind exploration of how it feels to be alive in America in the 21st century. Personal experience is subject to market and atmospheric fluctuations.

Praise

“If Frank O’Hara were eating lunch in the 21st century, he’d be Georgia Faust. Too Big to Fail is a meditation on our emergency 60 years later, the self tripped up by junk bonds or rapid G**gle ads that cling to browsing history even when it’s cleared. A book so disjunct it’s melodious, and here, as in O’Hara, disjuncts act as semantic keys. A reverie for the out of pocket, but Faust takes a pass on melancholy; her careening cement truck of poetry is putting up no wall.”
– Erin Moure

“In Too Big To Fail, Georgia Faust punctures the gridded networks of capital to download the architectural blueprints of the financial crisis and the landscape of financial ruin. Cross section, binary fallout, or incision, Too Big to Fail mines the default language of crisis and extracts its ledger entries with a vengeance: Boeing engine parts, a poem as spreadsheet, the ghostly shapes of towers, radio waves, a deflationary gutter, and of course a glossary of fear and falling debris that keeps on plummeting down the page.”
– Tan Lin

“Georgia Faust has written a book of poetry in which experience and language are indivisible facts of disorientation & existential necessity at once on the move. Where certainty is externalized as spectral stance-music, & doubt is the internalized driver of perspective. Her poems square up against that poorly examined fact of our shared reality that converts risk & disaster into object, routine, daily micro-spectacle, & unsane emotional personscape, all fixed to come at us as pseudo-parsable onslaught. They see that reality from the inside-out, see what one’s mind, always forming, has to bear in order to be, & refuse any encapsulation. That refusal, combined with the pleasure of Faust’s anti-singular diction, push a hard idea of living right up against what it might mean to be free.”
– Anselm Berrigan

Press

Montreal Review of Books – “Georgia Faust’s Too Big to Fail is set in American crisis, grit, and debris. Faust transfers the inane capitalist logic behind the phrase ‘too big to fail’ to cultural structures that surround us.”

Excerpts

Prelude Mag – A Glossary of Vertigo

Georgia Faust

Georgia Luna Smith Faust was born, raised, and currently lives in lower Manhattan where she presides over poetry and corporate bankruptcy administration. She is the author of the chapbook Too Faust Too Furious (Resolving Host, 2016) and the collaborative artist book, Pests of Public Importance (Purgatory Pie Press, 2016). She holds a BA in Literature and American Studies from Macalester College and an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College.