“My poems couldn’t save me from wanting to die.” (An Interview With Adrienne Novy)
As part of the virtual tour to celebrate the five year anniversary reprint of Adrienne Novy’s Crowd Surfing With God, journalists, bloggers, and editors across the Internet have been sharing reviews of the book for the past week on their platforms in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss reviews by Glen Damprado (“These poems spoke to me on such a deep level that I ended up reading a few of them several times”) and Caitlin Conlon (“These poems are not begging to be seen. Rather, they present themselves with their heads held high”). Also, an exclusive essay for the Half Mystic blog (“That intensity is impossible to replicate as an adult, I think, because it reverts to nostalgia for us”)! Today, Adrienne joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of Crowd Surfing With God: 5 Year Anniversary Special Edition.
H/M: It’s a tremendous thing you’ve done, reimagining a manuscript that’s already been published. What made you want to return to Crowd Surfing With God?
AN: I feel so privileged to be able to give new life to a text like this. I often joke that my writing career is based on the phrase “What would Hanif Abdurraqib do?” That’s very apt for the re-release, I think, since Hanif’s announcement of a five year anniversary edition of his poetry collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was what sparked my initial proposal to Half Mystic. Hanif does so much creatively that makes me think, “Wait! That’s so cool! I didn’t know you could do that! I want to do that, too!”. I’m lucky to be surrounded by friends who give me that feeling.
Crowd Surfing With God has always focused on what it means to find beauty in the whole of oneself, and those themes appear centrally in the anniversary edition. Has your relationship with recovery changed since the first printing of the collection?
Absolutely, mainly because I’ve done more of it in the clinical mental health sense. The October after Crowd Surfing With God’s first release, I underwent dialectical behavior therapy for the first time. I also graduated from a partial hospitalization program this past fall. Moving out and living on my own since the first printing has been a blessing, in that those actions let me take my mental health into my own hands without feeling the need to ask for parental permission.
Healing poses pitfalls and complications, and writing about healing can be its own crucible. Which of the new poems was the most challenging to write?
The last poem in the book, “In Lieu of a Desert Song,” was the hardest for me to return to, because it focuses on two friends of mine who died by suicide in 2020 and 2021. Not only will they never get to see the anniversary edition of Crowd Surfing With God, but my poems couldn’t save them or bring them back. My poems couldn’t save me from wanting to die, either.
The final line of “In Lieu of a Desert Song” goes: “I am thankful to have lived my life long enough to love it.” I edited the book this summer to send to Half Mystic’s editors after a round of feedback, but my life outside of poetry came to a head not too long after, and I grew the closest to attempting suicide in years. There’s a sad irony in that—despite the (maybe blind) optimism of the book’s last line, I actually did not live my life long enough to love it. But then again, I live with mental illness. My love of being alive isn’t constant, and that love is always fighting the voice telling me that the world is better off without me. I’m still learning to make peace with the tension.
One hallmark of your poetry is its precise, intricate use of white space. Tell us about your relationship with form and where you take inspiration.
Poetic form is fun, but only if I can break it. Half of the work of my writing is thinking about what structure best serves the poem. Oftentimes I’ll try a new form for a piece that’s stalling, just to play with how it might take up space on the page. That allows me to jumpstart the excitement I felt at the beginning of the writing process for any given work. There’s a scene in the film Big Hero 6 where the main character’s brother picks him up, holds him upside down, and tells him to “find a new angle!” My relationship with form feels a lot like that.
My inspiration, when it comes to form and otherwise, changes on a regular basis. Lately I’ve been loving Edgar Kunz, who wrote Fixer and Tap Out. He’s very purposeful about where he breaks a line and, like Hanif, his work brings up the “Ooh! I want to do that!” feeling for me.
The reimagining of past selves plays an important role in this collection. What, if anything, did the version of you who wrote the first edition of Crowd Surfing need to hear? How have you spoken to her in these new poems?
I think she just needed to hear that it’s okay to wait—for happiness, for peace, for the book to find its audience. I don’t know if I’m reaching backward in the anniversary edition so much as listening to that younger self reach forward, telling me I’m allowed to outgrow old poems and grow into new ones. The poems I wrote years ago can exist in their time, and I can honor the pride I felt in writing them while still moving into work that feels more relevant to my present and future selves.
In addition to new poems, the anniversary edition of Crowd Surfing also features some great new threads! Tell us about the updated cover art and how you decided on this image.
I am so in love with the cover! The artist, Jules Darling, also did the cover for my second collection of poems—Erev Gildene with Game Over Books, published in November 2022. Jules is a dear friend and an artist I respect tremendously, but I realized after Erev Gildene came out that the anxiety I felt around my second book had led to my creatively cornering them. The pressure I placed on myself made the work of collaboration harder for someone else, and I decided that I didn’t want to put another artist in that headspace again. For Crowd Surfing, I gave Jules a few reference images, colors, and songs, and left the rest in their hands. Letting them take the reins on this cover is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Self care is another recurring theme of the book. How have you tended to yourself through the process of revisiting these poems?
I have trouble navigating self care, which was especially tough given that I worked two jobs while I rewrote and revised Crowd Surfing. I tend to push myself to the point where if I don’t take a break, my body will force me into one.
But I have grown better at setting boundaries since graduating from partial hospitalization. I say “no” more often, and spend most of my days off asleep. Writing and editing poems is work that doesn’t feel like work—but that said, staring at a five year old book on a laptop screen for hours on end can get to anyone after a while! I’m a barista, and sometimes I would visit the café on my days off to revise poems. Getting out of the house and changing my surroundings was the only way I could finish the manuscript. My coworkers would see me at one of the long tables and ask, “Aren’t you off today? Why are you here? Are you working on the book again?”
Your work uses popular culture to navigate complex questions about what it means to accept the body in its glories and failings. How did those two elements come to be so entwined in your writing process?
Pop culture allows me to approach raw, vulnerable, or emotionally intimidating subjects through a more familiar lens. That can present its own challenges—when I write about the body by referencing My Chemical Romance, for example, I have to base the work around a quote or song lyric that fans will recognize without cutting out readers who don’t know the band at all. But I love the research involved in writing poems based on pop culture. I think of it as a tool to face, process, and filter difficult topics rather than directly hitting the nerve.
Speaking of My Chemical Romance—pop punk plays an integral part in both editions of Crowd Surfing With God. How has your relationship with music changed since 2018? What’s on your favorite playlist these days?
Much of my music taste is the same as it used to be—MCR was my top Spotify artist of 2023, and that would be true regardless of my book’s re-release! Just like five years ago, my process centers around listening to songs on repeat and writing in response. If my relationship with music has changed at all, it’s because I don’t play clarinet the way I used to. I loved the instrument for so long that it became an important part of my identity, until I found myself burned out in college. I want to play more consistently, but right now I’m not in a living environment where I can make mistakes freely. Maybe that will be a goal for 2024.
I put a lot of thought into the playlist I made for my coffee shop job—it has over 200 songs, mostly ‘80s jams, but also some silly picks. My coworkers will know I’m on aux when customers start asking about the song from Shrek playing. And right now I’m loving boygenius, the trio of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. I saw them play in Chicago this past summer, and they’re incredible live, maybe even better than in their studio recordings. Poems are at the heart of most things, so I’ve started working on a collection about boygenius and mental health recovery. Their latest, the record, is a beautiful ode to their friendship. I love the love they have for each other as humans and musicians. I might have listened to “Not Strong Enough” hundreds of times!
In its five year anniversary edition, Adrienne Novy’s Crowd Surfing With God surges back to life with updated work, new and unreleased poems, and a foreword by National Book Award-nominated bestseller Hanif Abdurraqib. This coming-of-age-journey through poems tells a story of self-acceptance that discusses growing up with a rare genetic disorder and mental illness, family and being in a multifaith household, pop culture, and the acts of playing and listening to music bringing you closer to yourself and to healing.
The virtual tour for Crowd Surfing With God features advance reviews, interviews with Adrienne, and exclusive, never-before-seen content on the creation of the book. Crowd Surfing With God: 5 Year Anniversary Special Edition is available for preorder now.