Summertime and the living is really weird (Plus: I am reading at the NYC Poetry Festival *tomorrow,* 7/12, at 12:30 pm)

(Cross-posted from my Substack)

The day before my Brooklyn book launch for Cosmic Tantrum, I found a raccoon’s jawbone in the park. This is not the first time a bone has presented itself to me on a walk. I thought I don’t need that and tried to walk away, but I was lying and I couldn’t. So I pocketed it.

Fifty paces later, I was reunited with a glove I’d been missing since last spring. Someone put it on top of a fence like a flag. (Thank you, stranger.) I hadn’t recognized it at first as mine—my raccoon brain just noticed an object of interest, the way it always does. An object out of place! My object out of place!

Launching my collection and going on tour felt a little like that—being at the right place at the right time many months after setting something in motion. Following breadcrumbs. Finding something I didn’t know was lost, or that I had learned to live without.


(Brief interruption here: I am reading at the New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island tomorrow, July 12th, at 12:30 pm, with Sweet Action Poetry collective. We will be at the Beckett Stage. Come hang out, New York! Ferry deets here. Festival deets here.)


Other than touring and getting to talk poetry, consciousness, and brattiness at all the fantastic journals and podcasts I’ll list below, I’ve spent most of the past months just putting one foot in front of the other. Maybe you have, too. I love editing, but working for myself is a balancing act on a good month, and is even harder when the background frequency of life is chaos, the snip-snap of wars and tariffs, disgusting attempts to eradicate trans people, the normalization of kidnapping. I’m pretty sickened and also I guess not surprised that elected officials want to defund basically every public service and safety net to increase the budget for ICE, an organization that anyone could pretend to be part of right now, as masked and badge-less individuals abduct American citizens and disappear people to El Salvador.

On bad days, I ask myself why any of us make anything, and what the point of art could possibly be when people struggle to have their basic needs met, and to have any access to peace or calm. My poetry collection is about lots of things, but one important thread is that when a system is dysfunctional enough and you have tried to change it over and over again from different angles and approaches, to no avail, sometimes you can find peace only by leaving. That can work for relationships, workplaces, apartments. But lately the dysfunction feels like A Lot and From Too Many Simultaneous Directions.

I don’t have answers. But this is what I think about when I ask myself Why bother?

  • Because creating fictional worlds flexes our possibility muscles.

  • Because it’s not possible to write an interesting character without understanding—and, to at least some degree, sympathizing with—their perspective.

  • Because writing memoir requires honest engagement with our shortcomings and our capacity to grow.

  • Because writing anything good requires the ability to see the big picture in the small details and vice versa, and to understand how structure creates meaning.

  • Because reading about and falling in love with an imperfect character can give us compassion for those faults in ourselves and others.

  • Because creative writing is a practice of meaning-seeking and -making, a quest to understand and to share that understanding.

  • Because curiosity is the antidote to contempt.

  • Because contempt will kill us.

  • Because we turn to poetry during life’s big transitions—weddings, funerals—when everyday language feels insufficient.

  • Because there’s nothing so enchanting as following the movement of associative thought, as poetry allows, and finding yourself changed by the experience.

  • Because reading their writing connects us with people who lived hundreds of years ago.

  • Because I am always moved almost to tears when I see ancient handwriting. Maybe you are, too.

  • Because people of the future will want to know what real people thought, not just what the papers printed.

  • Because attention is a currency and we should spend it on each other.


Questions/thoughts/experiments:

Experiment:

It was a few weeks ago now, but in honor of the solstice, I’m riffing on a visualization exercise I learned from Liza Fenster (Crow Mother), for remembering the light you carry at your center. Imagine you have X-ray vision and can see a flame inside your body, near your tailbone. This is your own personal sun. Think of it like a battery. When you inhale, picture that flame climbing. On your first inhale, it climbs as high as your belly button. On the next, as high as your heart. Then your throat. Then your forehead. Then the top of your head. How does that glow feel as it takes up more and more space in your body? Does it have any lingering effects?

What does it do for your creative work if you power up like this before starting it?

Question:

This is an old favorite from Jessa Reed, for when you feel stuck about what decision to make, in your art or in your life: Which option would you choose, what path would you take, if no one would be mad at you?


It’s been so sweet and surreal to see my book out in the world, and to talk to friends and family who aren’t usually poetry-readers who’ve been excited about it!

I’m very grateful to Brooklyn Poets, Northwestern University Press, AWP 2025, The Ninth House shop, The Booksmith, Bishop & Wilde, and Open Books: A Poem Emporium for hosting me for events, and to these writers who agreed to read and/or be in conversation with me: Lauren Milici, Leigh Stein, Lena Moses-Schmitt, AngieDoe, Megan Pinto, Jes Baker, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Sage Danielle Curtis, Joe Wadlington, Preeti Vangani, Sally Ashton, Ellee Achten, Genevieve DeGuzman, Julia Gaskill, Jessica E. Johnson, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Gabrielle Bates! Thank you all for a fantastic first book tour.

A fall tour might be in the cards? I have a few other stops in mind but nothing set yet. If you’re interested in setting up an event with me in your area, and/or inviting me to your classroom or school, give me a shout.


As referenced above, here’s my List of Links to Cosmic Tantrum podcasts, interviews, essays, reading lists, etc.:

Podcast interview at Bevin: A Femme Over 40 and Her Friends

Interview at The Rumpus

Interview at Electric Literature

Essay at Write or Die on Gilmore Girls, Grey Gardens, and the mother wound

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

The Best Debut Books of 2025 (So Far) at Debutiful

Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025 at Ms. magazine

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

And I can’t resist including this post-pub blurb from a master of the tragicomic mode, Lemony Snicket:

“This is such a terrific book—so generous and marvelous as it careens (but carefully!) from place to place.” —Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, author of And Then? And Then? What Else?

If you read and loved Cosmic Tantrum, tell your friends! (If you didn’t like it, keep it to yourself! lol) And consider leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads, and/or The StoryGraph—this helps strangers find it. If you’re a writer and reviewer, consider pitching a review at a journal that accepts post-publication coverage? Thank you, friends.

Three poems on the Debutiful podcast

For the First Taste series on the Debutiful podcast, I read the following poems from Cosmic Tantrum:

“Fate Myth with Manufactured Need”

“NO ONE WANTS TO VOLUNTEER FOR AN EMBODIMENT ON EARTH ANYMORE”

“Ars Poetica with Need and Wild Cats”

You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts

or you can listen on Spotify

or wherever else you like to listen!

Many thanks to Debutiful for inviting me as a guest, and for the lovely graphics :)

New essay at Literary Hub, and a reading list at Electric Literature

Poetry is a trickster of a genre: not fiction, not nonfiction, but also not not them: both/and, either/or. Likely predating the written word, poetry in ancient times saved and circulated information worth remembering, facts and fictions: history, genealogy, myths, legends, declarations of love.

Somewhere along the line, the concept of “the speaker” emerged—a hybrid of nonfiction’s rule that the narrator is the author, and fiction’s rule that the narrator is not the author but an imagined character.

With “the speaker,” poetry’s narration occupies a flirty, winking middle space: Who’s to say if the narrator is the author? Even when a poem insists on its nonfictional nature, as “Come On All You Ghosts” by Matthew Zapruder does (“in this poem // every word means exactly / what it means / when we use it in every day life”), the rules of poetry dictate that the “I” is never exactly the author—but the author in a costume, or another voice entirely.

(read the full essay at Literary Hub)


(thank you to Pine State Publicity for the awesome graphic)

Say what you will about Scorpio people (and I hope you’re saying nice things because I know and love many Scorpios), but Scorpio themes make for heart-wrenching, compelling, juicy literature. Astrologer Chani Nicholas writes of “Scorpio’s underworld qualities, as well as its powers of regeneration.” Lately I’m fascinated by books featuring literal and psychological underworlds—which have captured the interest of readers and listeners for thousands of years, judging by the ancient Greek myth of Persephone and Hades, and the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna that preceded it. A person might become lost in an underworld, or else journey through one to discover something previously hidden about our own strength and resilience, and what we actually value.

Along with underworlds, Scorpio is associated with death and rebirth, something I took to heart while working on my poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum: I spent years writing an initial version that I later threw away, starting over from scratch to make something that feels darker and more complex, more me. My birth chart shows four planets in my eighth house, which is ruled by Scorpio. The eighth house encompasses some of the thorniest and most intense aspects of life: death, yes, but also sexuality, transformation, taboos, the occult, other people’s money, and letting go of attachments. Having multiple planets in one house is called a stellium—or, as my tarot teacher and astrologer Jeff Hinshaw likes to say, a house party. I wanted my book to feel like that—like a cast of big personalities walking through a haunted house. And in this new form, it does: Big and Little Edie exchange psychic barbs in their crumbling Hamptons mansion, a “local beast” minds its own business while townsfolk enact a strongly worded letter, and an Eldest Daughter awakens from the sleepwalk of automatic compliance. 

Some of the books below percolated in the back of my mind while I wrote Cosmic Tantrum and some have come to me more recently. Each has inspired me with its willingness to plumb the depths of human experience, to sit companionably with mystery, and to find home and self-possession in and through the shadows. All of these qualities embody Scorpio energy, while the subjects and events of the books—taboos, inheritances, death, transformation—are aligned with the eighth house. Each book on the list feels kindred. I’m a Jill of all genres, so rather than narrow the list to just poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, this list is a mixer. A house party, if you will.

(read the full list at Electric Literature)

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!

Out now: I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES by Taylor Byas

Image of the cover of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas, featuring a portal peek at the Chicago skyline

It was an absolute honor to work on this collection with Taylor Byas, and I’m so glad everyone else can read it too and be floored by the power, grace, and agency of these poems. Taylor takes familiar forms and turns them on their heads, bends and sculpts them into something inevitable but surprising. Through it all, a clear picture emerges—of Chicago, of Black girlhood, of reclaiming the stories.

Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power


I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz—a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home—serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her.

Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.


*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*

Shortlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award
The Millions, A Must-Read Poetry Book of Summer


“A buoyant blast of South Side love and ache, conversing with Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg, finding room for Harold’s Chicken and Claudia Rankine.” —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

“In prose both heart wrenching in one line and hilarious the other, Byas paints a portrait of life in Chicago with all of its ups and downs.” —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Magazine

“A literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary . . . Her collection is a love letter to the city that made her—and to her own journey of self-discovery.” —Diamond Sharp, Chicago Magazine

“With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues . . . Byas etches out the beauty in the most mundane parts of Chicago with a reflective eye . . . I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times offers a weighty contribution to Black Chicago’s poetry legacy.” —Reema Saleh, Chicago Reader

“This impressive debut is a celebration of Chicago’s South Side, telling the story of a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery. Every poem is alive with the beauty and intimacy of growing up in the city . . . [A] stunning achievement whose lyricism echoes some of Chicago’s greatest poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Eve L. Ewing.” —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

“It is impossible to understate the breadth and skill that Byas demonstrates throughout I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times . . . This collection is further proof that Byas is one of the most important voices in American poetry . . . We are experiencing a legend in the making.” —The Poetry Question

“[An] ecstatic debut . . . These nuanced and complex poems offer unforgettable snapshots of Black life in a vibrant city.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The poet uses her strong voice to deliver evocative, richly described snapshots . . . In this promising work, Byas tells an intimate story of growing up.” —Booklist (starred review)

“My fellow Chicagoans, rejoice. Taylor Byas’s poems are visually stunning and formally inventive. They give us more proof that everything dope does indeed come from Chicago.” —José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold

“So many of the greatest poets in the American tradition have been Chicago Black women and this debut collection is an announcement that one more has joined that proud tradition. Byas’s work unfolds with tender attention to all sides of life in the Black metropolis. From mulberry trees to daisy dukes to candy ladies to liquor stores, this work sings of the city that raised me in an authentic way, with a careful formal attention befitting the lineage of Gwendolyn Brooks. This is a work to cherish.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems

“In The Wiz, Dorothy finds the song of Oz and follows it down the road, easily—Taylor Byas unearths that spirit-music, too, in her stunning debut, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. These poems illuminate Chicago, the body, the sweat of condensation on the Kool Aid cups cooling in the heat on a summer day in technicolor memory and careful music. It is the Chicago that’s there all along among the emerald streets, the self that is always there, the loud and frightening sparkle of a father’s memory, and the sharp edge of a lover’s rough touch. It is the shades of love blooming, green, across the South Side of Chicago. In fresh, inventive, and living formal verse and free verse, Taylor Byas paints the golden path, brick by brick, and we ease on down it.” —Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!: Poems

“Some collections attempt to build new worlds. Others return to old worlds and write them anew. Byas’ dive into the familial and the familiar is an intimate project, one that questions motherhood, love, and mourning in tandem. All this, in a Chicago that shole ain’t what this world tries to make of it. Taylor’s Chicago flexes and bristles and brims with life. In Byas’ work, Chicago is a/the world, one reimagined as a clever, raw, and beautiful character. Clever, especially so because Byas uses a vast toolbelt stocked well with forms and voice(s) and smirking candor. She tells us of and tells us the truth. Byas writes, ‘what we want has so little room to grow,’ yet all the while, makes room, makes room, makes room. Move out the damn way already!” —Aurielle Marie, author of Gumbo Ya Ya: Poems