Cosmic Tantrum: Poems

by Sarah Lyn Rogers

A debut full-length poetry collection from Sarah Lyn Rogers 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.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2025

About the author

Sarah Lyn Rogers is an NYC-based writer and editor from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her editing credits include books for Soft Skull Press, short stories and personal essays for Catapult magazine, fiction for The Rumpus, and serving as series co-editor for the annual anthology Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Inevitable What (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” (Ghost City Press, 2021) and she wrote a column for Catapult called Internet as Intimacy. She was the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets' Virginia de Araujo Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award. Her debut full-length collection, Cosmic Tantrum, is available now from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.

For more of Sarah's work, visit sarahlynrogers.com.

Reviews

[Emma Bolden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmic Tantrum is now one of my favorite collections of poetry. I started reading it again as soon as I finished it. I'm in awe of the range of these poems: at times I was laughing out loud (no, really, actually out loud) and at times I was moved to tears. Sarah Lyn Rogers transitions so gracefully from one emotional tone to another, however, that it never felt like whiplash: it felt fully, incredibly authentic. These poems interrogate the way that (late-stage) capitalism affects how we live, how we form relationships, how we deal with the fact that so many, if not all, of those relationships are transactional. Rogers also examines how these relationships shatter our identities, forcing us to perform according to the situation and to the audience. But this is also a book about finding and freeing your core self, and discovering ways to liberate the self from the expectations of transactional relationships and a world that wants to tell us what we're worth. I will return to these poems, I know, again and again.

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazed and delighted by the range of these poems. I went back and forth from serious contemplation to laughing wildly while reading in the morning on the train, no doubt worrying those sitting closest to me. From tragi- to comic, sometimes even within the same poem. From childhood to a tech inundated adulthood grappling with the same questions of personal autonomy in a world where everyone seems to want something from you, and it’s your job to figure out what that thing is. From the everyday banalities of working an office job to Charlie Brown. This collection feels so expansive in scope. I can’t wait to read whatever the author does next.

[Sky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a copy from the author, and I'm so glad I did. She weaves together personal experiences with references to popular culture, both fictional and historic, in ways that reveal truths that underlie them. It's reminiscent of Mythologies (and similar works) by Roland Barthes in its dissection and use of meanings. Charlie Brown, Stretch Armstrong, Grey Gardens, their essences purified and repurposed.

Older gods are here too: Fenris, tarot, Horace. But it's the newer ones that resonated particularly strongly for me and made reading this a really great experience. I look forward to more from this author.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whip-smart and aching towards the beautiful. Grief, humor, real magic, email drudgery, Grey Gardens, righteous anger, and play, all taut on a blurry line brought slowly into focus through a profound reclamation of the childlike, the "beast"-ly. There's an intense skill on display here: in the way a three-line stanza can turn such a tight incisive phrase; in the ability to muster and temper contradictory feelings in the same poem; in the variety of voices on offer, through whose coherence we are led through a profound integrative process. This collection is absolutely the best I've read this year!

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If in place of a mentor you had a hostile mirror," begins this virtuosic riot of a collection. Sarah Lyn Rogers invokes pop culture symbols from Charlie Brown to "Little Edie" Beale to Natalie Wood, from tarot cards to guided meditations, as she rages against society's inherited myths. Defying the limits of form and language itself, Rogers asserts a shining new poetics of self-creation. I am grateful to Curbstone & Northwestern University Press for sending me a review copy; Cosmic Tantrum will be available February 18!

[Cathy VanLear · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun collection of poems and inspiring writing prompts. I have already conquered a few of them myself and thoroughly enjoyed the process as well as the results. My favorite writing prompt was to write about selling your hair which was both hilarious and tearful as I am a cancer survivor who recently lost every hair on my head! These poems evoked a range of emotions from laughter to self awareness to sadness which is admirable. A special thanks to Sarah for sending me a free copy through Goodreads along with the extra touches and her heartfelt note!

[Sarah Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Listen, I had to.)