“There exists a joy and hunger for more in that younger self.” (Adrienne Novy on Crowd Surfing With God: 5 Year Anniversary Special Edition)
The five year anniversary reprint of Half Mystic Press’ second book, Crowd Surfing With God by Adrienne Novy, comes out on December 18. Adrienne is an artist from the suburbs of Chicago (Potawatomi Land). A 2020 graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program, Adrienne’s work has been nominated for Bettering American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press 2018) and Erev Gildene: The Pop-Rock Survival Guide for the Modern Jewish Millennial (Game Over Books 2022). She lives on social media @adriennenovy and has a cat named Laurie. To kick off the virtual tour for Crowd Surfing With God: 5 Year Anniversary Special Edition, Adrienne joins us on the Half Mystic blog for a guest essay on the creation process of the book.
I wrote a book in my early 20s and got to revisit it in my late 20s, and that felt like serving my purpose. A lot has happened since the first edition of Crowd Surfing With God was released in 2018: I moved from Chicago back to Minnesota and into my first apartment, got into dialectical behavior therapy, fell in love, went on tour, fell out of love, graduated from college, and processed universal and personal griefs throughout the course of 2020 and onward.
Returning to poems that have been out in the world and on bookshelves is—I’ll admit it—a humbling experience. I’ve grown as a writer and human and even written a second book since Half Mystic published Crowd Surfing With God. Going through this collection again felt like all of the silly things I posted on Facebook as a teen coming up in my Memories section at once. Like, “Who let me write this?” “Why did I think this was a good idea?” “Are all of those exclamation points really necessary?”
But I’ve always known if I didn’t push stories about my childhood cat eye syndrome and punk rock teen years into the world that I’d grow too far away and never write them down at all. The poems in Crowd Surfing With God feel young because their speaker is young. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there exists a joy and hunger for more in that younger self.
One of my favorite things about young people—teenagers, specifically—is the organic intensity with which they love. That intensity is impossible to replicate as an adult, I think, because it reverts to nostalgia for us. But as a teenager, you’re in it with your full self.
I can’t name many times where I’ve felt certain that my poems have made a difference, but when I learned that two high schoolers I taught in a workshop had “The Pop Punk Bible” from Crowd Surfing With God printed out and taped to their bedroom walls, it brought me back to something. These teens were best friends, and they had this poem, my poem, about My Chemical Romance and suicidal ideation and wanting to live despite everything, in their spaces. It reminded them of their bond, made them feel connected to each other. I could sense that they were clinging to that bond with everything they had. It was a method of survival.
In the foreword to the five year anniversary special edition of Crowd Surfing With God, one of my poetry heroes, Hanif Abdurraqib, describes the book as “a salve and salvation.” For a long time, I didn’t think it was possible for my work to do that for someone. But then I remember the artists whose words have been my personal salves, healing my inner and outer worlds: the books of poems I carried in my backpack when I was the most mentally unwell in college; the picture books my mom read to me when I was a kid in the hospital having an allergic reaction to medication after a surgery. No matter how humbling it can feel to return to old work, the poems of Crowd Surfing With God were a salve to me before they were anything else. It’s a gift to know they have been a method of healing for someone beyond me—that they have touched and soothed the wounds I once believed were mine alone.
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.
For the next ten days, Half Mystic is hosting a virtual tour in collaboration with eight other blogs, journals, and newspapers featuring reviews of Crowd Surfing With God, 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.