A debut full-length poetry collection rewriting girlhood and summoning mischief
Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut full-length collection is a tragicomic exploration of codependent and transactional relationships: economies of shame, gifts as debts, businesses run like families, and families run like businesses. What transgressions and abuses do we believe are acceptable fees for safety or love, and who upholds these myths? The poems in Cosmic Tantrum examine how our most intimate relationships shape the way we move through the wider world—and what happens when we reject the stories we’ve inherited about our worth.
Cosmic Tantrum is out now!! Available at Bookshop.org, Northwestern University Press, and your favorite indie bookstore! Consider ordering from Open Books: A Poem Emporium to support a poetry-only indie store!
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A Debutiful Most Anticipated Book
An Electric Literature Most Anticipated Book
A Write or Die Most Anticipated Book of February
“Explores what girlhood means and how society treats young women with a brilliant eye.”—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“ . . . this virtuosic riot of a collection . . . asserts a shining new poetics of self-creation.” –Skylar Miklus, Electric Literature
“The poems are spiritual exercises: trances, tantrums, guided meditations, writing prompts. They move us to question who we are, who decided that for us, and how we can change those identities to match ourselves. Rogers is interested in the stories we tell ourselves but also what it means to reject those stories and write something new. A book as deeply critical of interpersonal codependency as it is on labor-exploitative late-stage capitalism, this collection asks us to question our relationships and how they serve us.” — Gabrielle Grace Hogan, The Rumpus
“Cosmic Tantrum is invested in the child who did not get to be a child, invested in the adult who remains one—for better or for worse. Rogers blends sympathy for Charlie Brown with hypnotic riffs on writing prompts, always letting fun live alongside something harder . . . Cosmic Tantrum makes immortal ugly feelings and dirty houses, with a warmth and cleverness to make them worthy of our attention.” —Summer Farah, Electric Literature
“It seems incredible—nay, impossible—that so many great poems could reside in a single collection, but, reader, it is credible and it is possible, because this is a book by Sarah Lyn Rogers. I read each page with absolute greed, astonished by this jewel-like horde of gorgeous ironies and hard-won information about things hidden since the start of the world.” —Lucy Ives, author of An Image of My Name Enters America
“‘Too much of this world’s currency / is shame,’ writes Sarah Lyn Rogers, in Cosmic Tantrum, which frees childhood of its innocence to indict the false motives of conditional love. Flipping the language of business, fairy tale, and dissolution, Rogers rewrites girlhood to offer a refuge from domesticity. Shifting form and address to reason with Kafka, Charlie Brown, Little Edie in Grey Gardens, and the ghosts that haunt survival, Cosmic Tantrum summons mischief to banish harm.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art
“As its title suggests, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum brilliantly confronts society’s infantilization of women by pulling an Uno reverse. What happens when society gets the “good girl” that it asks for? These poems rage during meditations, they defy in corporate emails, they turn their brattiness up so loud that we all turn to watch their meltdowns. But in our watching, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort with Rogers’s ‘outsized’ anger. This book reminds us that a tantrum is often a result of our own inattention and neglect. How do we soothe the monster we’ve created?” —Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
"William Blake taught us that nothing could be scarier than fairy tales for grown-ups. T.S. Eliot taught us that selfhood inheres in the desire for self-erasure. Somewhere in the wild space between these guiding poetics, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum lays a table for tea." —Rachel Feder, coauthor of Astrolit: A Bibliophile's Guide to the Stars
Interview at The Rumpus
Interview at Electric Literature
Essay at Literary Hub on the speaker as a mask, poetry as a ritual space
Reading list at Electric Literature, 10 books with scorpio/eighth house energy
Three poems on the Debutiful podcast, First Taste series
Three poems at DMQ Review’s Virtual Salon
Most Anticipated at Debutiful
What to Read in 2025 at 303Magazine
Most Anticipated at Electric Literature
Most Anticipated at Write or Die
New Poetry feature at Philly Chapbook
New Books feature at Literary Hub