Introducing Crowd Surfing With God: 5 Year Anniversary Special Edition
The brightside is back. We’re over the moon to announce a five year anniversary reprint of Adrienne Novy’s Crowd Surfing With God—the second-ever book published by Half Mystic Press back in 2018, & one of our bestselling titles. In the special edition, Crowd Surfing’s coming-of-age journey surges to life with updated work, ten brand-new poems, & a foreword by National Book Award-nominated bestseller Hanif Abdurraqib. This is a story of self-acceptance that discusses growing up with a rare genetic disorder & mental illness, family & being in a multifaith household, pop culture, & the acts of playing & listening to music bringing you closer to yourself & to healing.
Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! & Pilgrim Bell, wrote of the new edition of Crowd Surfing With God: “Adrienne Novy begins Crowd Surfing With God with a nod to the Song of Songs, utterly appropriate for a collection where so much feels like a dream and everything feels urgent. ‘I slept, but my heart was awake,’ says the Song of Songs, and Novy responds: ‘The imaginary audience in the driveway still hums to our shadows. / We break into our loudest prayer.’ Like the Song of Songs, this book orbits love on Earth that reaches far beyond: a father uses a steak knife to cut pills in half for his daughter, a singer howls into a microphone ‘like the Angel of Death.’ As with all the most interesting poets, Novy writes with her feet on the ground and her head in the stars.”
Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us & A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, called the collection “a book of consistent breaking and re-fixing. I love most how it pulls at the edges of all of Adrienne Novy’s many parts, stepping outside the binaries of love, loss, identity, genre, and all manner of things holy. There is sharp language and palpable imagery, yes. But what works best about the book is how it grabs a reader by each arm, dragging them into new directions, where something impossibly bright is waiting to be discovered.”
And Lip Manegio, author of We’ve All Seen Helena, wrote: “‘Vulnerability’ has become something of a buzzword these days, but when I sit with Adrienne Novy’s work, vulnerability is the first thing that comes shining through. The same open heart tenderness in Fall Out Boy’s very best lyrics sings in Novy’s ‘I have yet to forgive the ache I once created.’ The same way Dan Campbell might lead us through the complexities of aging and loss, Novy guides us through disability, grief, queerness, and deep gratitude for the things we love. The feeling I get when I watch Gerard Way onstage, screaming at kids not to kill themselves, is the same feeling in the line, ‘I am thankful to have lived life long enough to love it.’ There is something so special in this book, and I am thankful to have lived life long enough to read it.”
The five year anniversary special edition of Adrienne Novy’s Crowd Surfing With God comes out on December 18th & is available for preorder today. In its original release, this book was a salve & a salvation, a shout in the darkness, a prayer for not being alone anymore. Now she reemerges, five years older, five years holier. This is a collection of knuckles & cardinals, of emergency room gospels, of torches & seafoam & the blessing of a good pop punk concert. It’s for you, yes—but more importantly, it’s for the things that tried to destroy you & failed. It’s for the golden clamour of survival. It’s for the past selves that live in your hands & throat, still breathing, still breathing.