Crowd Surfing with God by Adrienne Novy | Book Review
A poetry collection to fulfill all your pop-punk dreams.
Crowd Surfing with God by Adrienne Novy (Half Mystic Press) is a colorful, immersive collection of poetry focusing on music and illness. Drawing on inspiration from pop punk songs, the poems will resonate with listeners familiar with the genre but the verses also provide a twist of language that will carve a mark into readers’ memories as purely Novy.
The poet’s focus o===============n illness and the body imparts a sense of vulnerability and fear that sometimes feels childlike. In “diary entry from the ronald mcdonald house near loyola children’s hospital, july 26th, 2004, summer after second grade, age 8,” for instance, the speaker feels young, compromised, and searching which lended to the poem’s subject.
Novy gives readers a glimpse into what it’s like to be a sick kid while employing the pop punk tradition of using a long, descriptive title to introduce a song (in this case, poem).
These poems stand on their own.
“in bloom,” the first poem in the collection, is a more subtle nod to the pop punk genre:
“blossoms splitting the fretboard, phrygian dominant prayer, o, how my softness bites so clean. Bottom lip…
