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good luck in the real world is a journey through mental health recovery. After a near-suicide attempt, Adrienne Novy was partially hospitalized. Two years later, her mother suffers a brain bleed. Exploring suicidal ideation, hospitalization, the burnout from working hospitality and food service, and Novy’s fascination with music and pop culture, good luck in the real world explores what we cling to when we learn how to heal & what it means to fall in love with life again.

Awards

2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner Up

Praise for Adrienne Novy

Adrienne Novy is my favorite kind of poet: one that can make music out of anything. good luck in the real world is a companion for anyone with an ache—which is to say: these poems are perfect for everyone with a pulse.

– José Olivarez, Promises of Gold

Novy deftly maneuvers the heaviness of lived trauma & anxiety while still wrapping the reader in daisies, chamomile, & aliveness. These poems will become a song you can’t stop humming, a melody to stroke your hair & lull you to sleep on the dark days; an anthem for survival.

– Meg Ford, Wild/Hurt

good luck in the real world is a hard-earned and swervy testimony, a captain’s log if the captain is cracking jokes and bailing out the half-sunk ship with a grapefruit spoon. These poems are brave and stubborn and searching. They have me whispering to myself I want to live, I want to live, I want to live. 

– Edgar Kunz, Fixer