My book has a cover! (and she's a bratty little beaut)

(cross-posted from my Substack)

Hey, hi! I don’t normally send back-to-back newsletters in the same month, but I also don’t normally have such good news that I want to share right away!

This is the official cover for my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, which will be out February 15, 2025 from Curbstone Books (an imprint of Northwestern University Press). The cover is by Marianne Jankowski (mjdesign.studio) and is a real eye-catcher, IMHO. I love the bold graphics and the orbit lines and that audacious little spark at the bottom of the lightning bolt. Also, this font, which reminds me of Art Nouveau meets The Jetsons.

In addition to a cover, my book now has a page at NUP’s site where you can preorder it! (You should also be able to request by ISBN from your favorite indie bookstore.) Preorders really help authors, as they can signal to booksellers and sales reps that there’s a lot of interest in a book before it’s even out, which can mean more stores will carry the book, generating more interest, etc. 🔄

I’m running my own DIY preorder campaign inspired by a tarot offering I used to do (a mini-reading plus a custom poem). If you’re one of the first 50 preorders (and want this, lol), I will pull three cards for you and write you a little something in response to them. If you’re one of the first 100 preorders, I will send you a signed bookplate. ✍️

If those goodies are of interest to you, email a copy of your receipt to me at cosmictantrum [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know what address I can snail mail your goods to. 💌

Many thanks to Marianne Jankowski, my editor Marisa Siegel, and the whole NUP team. And many, many thanks to Rachel Feder, Taylor Byas, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who wrote such beautiful blurbs (and to Lucy Ives, whose beautiful blurb came in after the original version of this post went out):

“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

“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 

“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

“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

Thank you so much for celebrating with me!

2023 brought me my first BOOK DEAL

Hey.

It’s me.

We made it to the end of the year, pals.

Last year was the first time I noticed that the coldest winter weather doesn’t coincide with the solstice, the shortest day (at least in the northern hemisphere). There are weeks of little light, and then weeks of bitter cold. Same for summer: the solstice brings the longest day and the most light, but I don’t feel the hottest heat until the following months. Maybe the weather is different where you live, but it was true for me again this year and I found something beautiful in that: how it looks doesn’t have to match how it feels. (And how it feels doesn’t have to match how it looks.)

As a writer, I tend to have long, slow seasons of output that no one sees. Eventually, months or years later—when I’m further away from the self who made the work—it (that self and that work) finally meets other people through publication.

The oldest poems in my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be eight years old by the time the book is out. It’s a collection I wrote years ago, burned to the ground (excepting those few old poems), and rewrote hoping to match the kind of winking melodrama of the title. It’s absurd and serious, like a life.

Here’s the official announcement screenshot, with a collage-border embellishment of my making. I’ve been in these before as an editor, but never for *~*~my own book, as the author*~*~

By the time I was given the okay to share the good news on social media, I had already known for several months that the book would eventually exist in the world. I’d had my private peak-experience solstice-y feelings about it before I could share the news with others. Maybe that’s the way. We are asked to hold and process so much on any given day—often so much pain and horror, so much to fight against and live alongside and through. I got to hold this joy and let it gestate a while, and now I’m glad to share it with you to pick up and set down again, or file away in your mind for a better time.

Because December is a month for accounting, beyond the book announcement, here’s What Else I Got to Share in 2023:

• The Zürich-based art gallery Sgomento Zurigo commissioned a poem from me for their show, “Singalong,” featuring artworks by Ken Kagami and Anders Dickson. In addition to using the poem in the exhibition’s pamphlet, they hung it in the gallery!

• My press-mate Michael Chang invited me to read a few poems at the launch for their poetry collection, Synthetic Jungle. Books Are Magic recorded the reading.

• The Millions published my review/essay on Lucy Ives’s excellent novel Life Is Everywhere, Cyrano, Sarah Bernhardt, alter egos, and reality vs. “reality.”

• Taylor Byas’s brilliant debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which I had the pleasure of editing, was published in August and has already won the Maya Angelou Book Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry!!

• With Summer Farah, I co-edited Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize and wrote an intro about art as “content,” the writers’ strike, AI art as “a manifestation of an authoritarian fantasy: an ‘artist’ that can’t say no, and works for free,” and how these winning stories are the result of each writer’s choices and refusals. This year’s prizewinners were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz. The winning writers are Dailihana E. Alfonseca, Ren Arcamone, Sonia Feldman, Stephenjohn Holgate, Faire Holliday, Mengyin Lin, Verity McKay, Clara Mundy, Jo Saleska, Annabelle Ulaka, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Patrick J. Zhou. You can read interviews with the winners here.

• My essay on John Darnielle’s Devil House, homes with dirt rooms at their secret centers, and the nightmarescape of California real estate was published in Vol. 1 of the print edition of word west revue.

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s daring, touching, experimental memoir, Touching the Art, which I also had the pleasure of editing, was published in November. In a Between the Covers conversation with Mattilda, David Naimon describes the book in a way I love, as “speculative nonfiction,” a “beautiful gesture against, I think, the inevitability of history.”

• After many years of submitting work there (by postal mail!!), I was really honored to publish a poem in ZYZZYVA. “Baby Island” appears in their Fall Issue, No. 126.

• In honor of the Gemini Full Moon (and because I’m a Gemini Rising 😈 ), my tarot teacher Jeff Hinshaw invited me as a guest on their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. Jeff did deep reads of a few of my poems and explained how they relate to my astro chart, which was pretty sick.

• I’m slowly making paintings that correspond with my poems, with excerpts of the text pasted on, zine-style. I partnered with a local print shop that will print and ship any ordered through my website.

• And I read and edited over a million words this year in client projects—about 1.36 million across developmental edits and editorial assessments for novels, memoirs, story collections; copyedits, cold reads, and proofreads of novels and narrative nonfiction; book proposals; and misc. excerpts, essays, and stories.

I hope December is treating you as well as it can, and that you can linger for a while in this between-time of the end of the year. Wishing you catnaps (in lieu of hibernation) and hearty foods. Now that the shortest day has passed, each day offers a little more light.

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If you enjoyed this newsletter and want more, sign up for my Substack here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.

New poems at Dream Pop and Witch Craft Mag

FIVE poems from COSMIC TANTRUM, my I’m-still-tinkering-with-it full-length collection, are up now at Dream Pop Journal! Learning to let the writing be weirder and more fun, the way I think it has always wanted.

I cover the void with bones.
Some kind of person 

must feel a way about them.
Bones are not-void. Bones suggest 

beinghood. Had-once-been-hood.
I cover the void in Bésame lipstick

the good shit, in tiny gold tubes.
Could a void give you a name brand? 

Probably.

I also have two poems in Issue #7 of Witch Craft Mag, which can be ordered here.

I’m like, Really, you mean a terrifying vortex

of uncountable wings and eyes

moving at incomprehensible speed,

so stabbing-bright that you are sore afraid?

Thank you, Dream Pop and Witch Craft!