IT'S HER DAY: Cosmic Tantrum is out now!! 🔮 ⚡ 🖤 ✨ 🪐
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(cross-posted from my substack)
At long last, pals! Today, Cosmic Tantrum materializes—fully formed—on the earth plane. If you’re a traditional observer of this holiday, you’ll of course want to make a ceremonial visit to your local indie bookstore, or support one online.
To see all the nice things other people have said about it so far, you can peep the homepage of my website.
To help me ~*~spread the good word~*~ you can share this post 😊
Brooklyn book launch!
New York pals, you can celebrate with me in person next Saturday, February 22nd (that’s 222, for the angel number girlies) at Brooklyn Poets, along with AngieDoe, Lauren Milici, Megan Pinto, Lena Moses-Schmitt, and Leigh Stein! Full deets here. Tickets here. Hope to see you there!!
I’m cooking up some more events, both in person and virtual, so stay tuned for further deets.
AWP folks: I will be there!
Northwestern University Press is hosting a mixer event on the evening of Thursday, March 27th, and I will be signing books at NUP’s booth on Saturday, March 29th, from 1:00–2:00 pm. Come say hey!!
Tarot blog at NUP
Northwestern University Press kindly asked if I might revive “books as tarot spreads” and do one for Cosmic Tantrum. If you want to see why I think she’s the Eight of Swords, The High Priestess, and The Fool, have yourself a little clickety click.
To mark this momentous day, I asked a few Cosmic Tantrum–themed questions to author-friends of recently published and forthcoming books:
What does a "cosmic tantrum" mean to you? Have you ever had one?
What would your child self think about the life you lead now?
In what ways does your writing allow you to shape-shift, transform, play, or otherwise bend the "normal" rules of engagement?
& here are their responses!
Steven Duong, author of the just-released At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W.W. Norton, January 2025)
I love the title cosmic tantrum, the phrase, have loved it since I first heard it from you... In my mind it feels like an origin story, an explanation for the existence of life. Some entity had a cosmic tantrum and now here we are. Tantrum is such a good word. It's like pettiness and rage and illogic and all-outness. Not sure I've had a cosmic one myself, but hopefully one day...
I think my child-self would be pleased about how much of my adult life still revolves around play. Video games and D&D and that kind of make-believe he always loved, but also poetry and fiction writing, also playing music and playing with my dog and crafting things and making art. There's a lot of work, which I think he expected, but there's so much play.
Correct me if I'm wrong but rules of engagement is a military term, no? Like the proper gentlemanly etiquette with which to face your opponents on the battlefield? I kind of love that lol—slightly aggro, but it's fun to conceive of the writer's relationship to writing (or one's readers) as combative, because sometimes it feels that way! I think when you begin to write in strict forms (sonnets and ghazals are my personal fave), you can feel the constraints of those forms as the “normal” rules of engagement at first, but once you're comfortable on the field, hitting your marks, finding your footing, you’re able to scope out new angles, and idk, tell it slant, a little? Guerrilla tactics? When I write in form, I want most to construct this thing that feels like a true and even exemplary iteration of the form, but also something off-kilter, something that's ~technically~ put together correctly, but moves with its own weird gait. It's also something I really admire in songwriting. Bob Dylan's on the mind of late (thanks Timothee), and it's something he does so well—making these songs that so clearly know and respect the traditions of folk and rock and the blues and this sort of American songbook or whatever, but feel also slightly (and sometimes much less slightly) slant, strange, outsider, a bit rabid or fucked in the head in the best way.
Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual and the just-released Alligator Tears (Crown, February 2025)
It’s like when all the planets start beefing with each other and their fighting sends angry vibrations through the galaxy and when they reach earth they enter a human and that human goes the hell off for any little reason. Yes, I have like three cosmic tantrums every time I go to the airport.
I’d think like, “Wow, you got really gay, huh?”
I write for high school me, who was so shy and scared of being thought of as a weirdo or a freak for being queer that I was always looking for somewhere to hide. My writing is me giving myself permission to take up space, to play with performance and have people meet me on my own terms.
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, March 2025)—out next month!
To me, a cosmic tantrum conjures two things—either:
a) a long dark night of the soul, in which you toss and turn in an existential sweat for hours, recalling every horrible or embarrassing thing you've ever done or that's been done to you, before finally falling asleep an hour or two before your alarm is set to go off—only to somehow wake up with a renewed lease on life;
or
b) a short rage-fueled run where you get all of your anger out of your body by beating your feet against the pavement.
In either instance, the emotional fit has to be so powerful that it mysteriously transforms you—that's the cosmic part of the cosmic tantrum.I think she would be happy and relieved to know I'm still regularly doing the things that she loved to do—writing, drawing, reading books—and that I found a way to make them part of my life! I love this question—I think it's a good sign that my life tends to look sweeter and more rose-colored through the eyes of my child self. Yes, she is just a child. But she is more generous and simple (compliment!) than I am.
For me, writing—and especially writing poetry, of all things!—is inherently an act of doing all of the above. It's a way of stealing time, wasting time, slowing it down, speeding it up, and inhabiting it differently; of living in multiple places or times at once. It's a form of pretending and dressing up and dressing down and allowing myself to be stranger and more dramatic than I feel like I can be in my regular life. And, to reference your second question—I do think it forces me to put on the eyes of a child again, so that the world can be more bizarrely (i.e. accurately) perceived. I know all this sounds a bit woo woo but—I also think all of that is the strength of poetry, especially in a world that constantly devalues it.
Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times and the forthcoming Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, August 2025)
A cosmic tantrum to me is when I'm sort of raging with the universe, feeling like nothing is going the way I want, and then the universe hears me complaining and shuts me up by proving why things weren't supposed to go my way. I've had PLENTY.
My child self would be in awe of the life I live. Even though I was comfortable for most of my childhood and I was raised by a highly successful mother, I just never imagined that I would be where I am today, getting to follow my dreams and spend this life doing what I love. It is such a privilege. So many people don't get to follow their dreams. Younger me would be so proud.
Poetry is so cool because we get to cartwheel up and down the line between fiction and reality. Writing allows me to probe my real life on the page, but I get to get creative with how that happens. Do I keep myself on the page? Do I make myself a character? Do I put myself or my character in a fictional situation that communicates some sort of truth? I can do it ALL in poems, because poetry is that girl.
Leigh Stein, author of Self Care,What to Miss When, and other books, and the forthcoming If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You (Ballantine, August 2025)
I have a cosmic tantrum nightly between 1am and 3am when my brain is like, now is the best possible time to think about the future!
My child self would think I've achieved the dream of getting to stay home every day and live inside my imagination.
My fiction is where I feel the least inhibited, the most transgressive. Unlike in real, law-abiding life, you want to lean in to the question, Can I get away with this?
Candice Wuehle, author of Monarch, several poetry collections, and the forthcomingUltranatural(University of Iowa Press, March 2026
I love the paradox in this term—how it's both huge and petty, how it's affect writ large, the human delivered through the sublime, the suggestion that we deliver ourselves to ourselves through fidelity to our emotions in the radical manner of a toddler. I love toddlers and their radical selfishness. Yes, I've had a cosmic tantrum. I won't elaborate...
She'd probably think, “Called it.” I think I might be weird in that I've always expected to be pretty much what I am right now. At points when it felt like my life was peeling off into the wrong direction, I've felt indignation as opposed to dejection. I guess I'm saying I've been delulu til it's trululu since way back.
I was just talking to my class about “In Praise of Navel Gazing” by Melissa Febos, an essay I turn to a lot. Febos discusses the power of language and articulation to make otherwise oppressed and disregarded experiences palpable and real. There's nobody researching cures for diseases that haven't been named. I think the more I name the world around me and my embodied experience, the more I transform reality itself.
Writing prompts
It’s not my usual newsletter time, so I don’t have all the usual bells and whistles, but I did think it would be fun to include a few “universally relatable writing prompts” (lol) from Cosmic Tantrum:
Write about a barely coherent explosive argument whose subtext made sense only decades later.
Write about powering a small electrical grid with the intensity of your emotions.
Write about how the phrase “It’s just good business” is wielded like an incantation that can nullify wrongdoing.
Write about wondering why a soul would choose to incarnate here, but loving when a poem devastates you.
If you end up writing something from these prompts, I’d love to hear about it!
(Tinkerbell, September 2021, helping me arrange the poem order for Cosmic Tantrum)
(Magus, her successor, coming in on the assist today to make sure the finished copies are good and stomped.)
