A debut full-length poetry collection from Sarah Lyn Rogers rewriting girlhood and summoning mischief. A tragicomic exploration of codependent and transactional relationships: economies of shame, gifts as debts, businesses run like families, and families run like businesses.

Dedication Warm Blanket Tantrum The Content Is Supposed to Burst from the Contain Local Beast Time Travels, Body Swaps through Glitch in Matrix Rage Practice No One Wants to Volunteer for an Embodiment on Earth Anymore A Toast to the Dismay of Certain Industries Cosmic Tantrum Baby Island Posture of Dread What Is the Bird in Charlie Brown’s Name? “That's all I need—an ordered life” Cross-Section of the Nervous/Solar System Local Beast Recently Inhabited Shared Space Subtweeted Again in the Shared Google Doc Some Brainwashed Dude on Twitter Insists That to Be Valuable a Woman Must Possess the Mathematically Perfect, Suspiciously Babylike Skull of an Angel Let’s Practice Kissing, Compare Bra Sizes Halloween and I’m the Only One in Costume on the Subway Shut-in Tantrum Vermin Despite Many Proclamations, Little Edie Never Leaves Big Edie at Grey Gardens What a Person Makes You Hold—What You Hold for Someone—Lingers Please Answer to the Best of Your Ability Egg Trance Golden Child Tantrum To My Teenage Self, Who Always Fell for It Queen of Wands Self-Anthropology Tantrum about My Uterus Symptoms Depend upon Method and Duration of Exposure Pot-Bound Not Everyone Would Sooner Kill You Than Admit You Hurt Their Feelings Local Beast Withstands Record-Breaking Silent Treatment Applicant Must Have Renter Little Edie’s Memories and Her Flag Dance Guided Meditation with Mean Voice Artfully Vague Trance I Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained but the Concept Is Offensive and I’m Baby Halloween: “What even are you, anyway?” The Townsfolk Enact a Strongly Worded Letter Local Beast, Kind of a Little Bitch Actually Nothing Trance Guided Meditation with Inner Mother The Empress Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” It’s the Local Beast, Charlie Brown Guided Meditation with Inner Child Advice from an Upper Grader Exhibition: What Is It Like to Make Something That Matters? In Which Music Activates the Ventral Vagal Guided Meditation with Dead Musician Ars Poetica with Need and Wild Cats Acknowledgments

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