Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum (Curbstone Press, 2025), is a costume party of mask-wearing speakers embarking on a syrupy, stubborn inquiry into what it means to be anything at all. The poems are spiritual exercises: trances, tantrums, guided meditations, writing prompts. They move us to question who we are, who decided that for us, and how we can change those identities to match ourselves. Rogers is interested in the stories we tell ourselves but also what it means to reject those stories and write something new. A book as deeply critical of interpersonal codependency as it is on labor-exploitative late-stage capitalism, this collection asks us to question our relationships and how they serve us. More specifically, it asks whether the notion of service should enter the conversation at all.
Rogers is also the author of Inevitable What and co-edited the Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize from 2021–2023. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Rogers currently lives in New York City. I spoke with Rogers via Google Meet, where we spoke about the roles we play, the masks we wear, how compliance may not be a virtue, and why she thinks humor develops intimacy with the reader.
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The Rumpus: How did you know Cosmic Tantrum was ready to enter the world?
Sarah Lyn Rogers: Coming from publishing, I’ve been on the other side of the equation, so I understand the publicity and marketing machine. I know that poetry is a smaller, more niche genre, so I don’t have any illusions about the book making me famous and changing my life. But I’m also aware that it does change your life, and the fact that you can be known to other people in ways they didn’t have access to you before, even at the level of strangers understanding your obsessions. There’s something funny about wanting to share your work with people you’ve never met and also being aware that people who do know you, and have preconceptions about you, also have access to the work. So, that’s the experience I’m having right now.
I started writing parts of this collection ten years ago. There’s a ghost version that exists, that has almost entirely different poems in it, that I was sending around six years ago. It had a different title then, too. Once I settled on Cosmic Tantrum, it felt like it encapsulated my rage over fate, or ideas about what you are allowed to do. I really wanted the poems to honor the title, and most of the previous poems didn’t make the cut. So, I scrapped them and started over. I retained some from the original, but a lot was written in response to the collection title. I wanted to write something funny and large and wild.
Rumpus: The speaker takes on numerous forms and identities—girl, baby, beast, monster, to name some. There are various elements of “speaker-as-blank.” How did these serve the collection, considering how different they all seem at first glance from one another?
Rogers: I’m definitely interested in literal and figurative masks. There’s a series of photographs by Charles Fréger called Wilder Mann, where he was documenting folk customs across Europe. There’s a specific image on the cover of his book of these three folk figures called Babugeri: Bulgarian costumes made out of goatskins. You can tell there’s a human shape at the bottom and the top of it extends up four or five more feet, so there’s this really uncanny, defamiliarized human silhouette. It’s hard to articulate, but something about that is at the heart of the collection for me. It’s the real human underneath this costume that enables the person wearing it to tap into something more wild, untamed, true about their nature.
In these persona poems, I’m interested in making fun of the labels other people assign a person. You might notice in the “Local Beast” poems, the beast isn’t doing anything particularly beastlike, the beast is just vibing. Some external gaze is saying that this is a monster that must be contended with. It’s partly making fun of the labels, and questioning: “Is this a beast?” I’m also interested in the idea that sometimes you’re not capable of taking actions, or saying things, that you feel fully capable of doing yourself, but you’re limited by this preexisting narrative that other people have about you. Those are the beast poems. I have a lot of childlike poems, because in this collection I think of “child” as another mask. There’s a dual identity where there is a parentified child who doesn’t get to be a child, or figures, like Little Edie, an adult that seems trapped in childhood. I’m interested in this duality where people are not willing or able to be the age that they are because of what their external environment demands of them.
Rumpus: Why do you think masking and costumes and the performance of identity is interesting to you enough to explore in this collection?
Rogers: Part of it is a gendered thing. Regardless of what you feel like on the inside, people [who are] socialized as women are asked to serve others and adapt, in ways men are not asked to do. Part of the tantrum of the collection is rejecting [my role of] having played into that request. You’re capable of adapting and being malleable, and sure, you can say, “How high?” when somebody says, “Jump!” but to what end? I’m also interested in different types of people. There’s a way, when we’re writing characters, we can separate what they know about themselves from what is true, and I think that’s much harder for real people to think about for themselves. I’m interested in knowing when I’m lying to myself and how that allows me to make different choices later.
Rumpus: These poems are highly referential towards specific characters and stories, and the idea of storytelling in general. Little Edie and Charlie Brown in particular, come up again and again. Other poems move into the broader space of fairytales and folklore. What was your intent with these poems being so referential, especially towards these specific characters and stories?
Rogers: Before I knew that I was writing a collection, I saw Grey Gardens for the first time and was immediately obsessed by it. I think sometimes people watch this movie and see a couple of older women who are mutually satisfied in their shared delusion: happy, singing, dancing. I read a lot of bizarre power dynamics into their relationship. There was an HBO made-for-TV movie starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, where Little Edie is more of a tragic heroine who sacrifices her life to save her mother. I see Grey Gardens as a cautionary tale. Of the ways you can be of thankless service to another person and not be aware that you’re able to make different choices. The stories we have about loyalty to parents, or what it means to be a good daughter is to be a self-sacrificing person. I started with Grey Gardens poems to put my finger on, “What is the relationship between these women? What is their dynamic?” It’s not as simple as naming it. I think it lives in the world of symbol and association. There’s something subterranean about it. So, that’s why there’s so many Grey Gardens poems. Not all of them ended up in the collection, but I was churning those out for a while.
The first Charlie Brown poem was a one-off joke: “What Is the Bird in Charlie Brown’s Name?” That’s a real search I stumbled upon while looking for something else. The poet in me thought the bizarre syntax made a fun discovery, that there could be a bird inside someone’s name. So, that was a stand-alone poem. Originally, I didn’t think it went with the other ones. At some point, I had amassed enough poems to see they were circling similar themes. The bird poem is about not being seen for who you are but having some little spark—that only you are aware of—that can keep you going. That feels related to Little Edie for me. There’s some saving grace about her childlikeness that sustains her, a little beacon she carries. Then, I was consciously adding more Charlie Brown, making him interact with the beast. Then [I had] Charlie and Little Edie together in one of the “Writing Prompts” poems. There was a point in the collection where I was seeing what I had, and what was overlapping, and what wasn’t yet overlapping and seeing how I could make those things talk to each other. My hope is that it feels like it goes together.
I’m also interested in the question of “Who benefits from you being treated like a child?” Somewhere in there is the idea, to someone who invested in you as a child, it seems like a betrayal you ever grew up.
Rumpus: Looking at the table of contents, it’s easy to spot several series of poems within this collection: Trances, Tantrums, and Guided Meditations. These three stuck out, in particular, because of how they all appear concerned with the relationship between the body and the mind, either fighting or working together. What was the intention behind these exercises?
Rogers: I can’t remember if I started with the tantrums or the trances, but the trances came about because I was reading a book about hypnosis called Trance-formations. I’m curious about all the different ways the mind works. In our everyday lives we feel limited by the way things have to be, but when you realize that something that seems like objective fact is actually a story somebody told you, you can unlearn that, and behave differently. Similarly, I think there are ways of being we may not have access to in our regular consciousness. This idea that you could shift your consciousness by shifting your “frequency,” and then [gain] access to a different type of person, or change your behavior, is really interesting to me.
“Guided Meditations” is also about entering a trance state, but those are funny to me, because they can be used for good or for ill. One of the “Guided Meditations” is mean. I was playing with this idea that we take on negative attitudes given to us by our caretakers, or people who are important to our early formative experiences, and those people may live on, like a song, forever. You don’t think about where [that song] came from. I wanted to point out the disparity between a purposeful guided meditation, that’s wanting to enter your consciousness and improve you, and something running a show in the background, all the time, that isn’t something you want there. I like calling attention to both of those things in one poem. My hope is that people will think about what’s going on in the back of their mind and can get rid of it if [they] don’t like it.
Rumpus: Another series, the “Writing Prompts” poems, appear in a similar way. How do those function, in form as well as content?
Rogers: At one point, I had a running iPhone note of tweets, or aphorisms, that I wanted to include somewhere in the collection. By the time I got to the almost-completed collection, I hadn’t really used them. In the process of doing edits with my editor, Marisa Siegel, she felt the collection was too short. Before I turned in the final draft, I was tasked with writing five to ten more poems. Those poems came toward the end. I was using them as a way to consciously synthesize themes throughout the collection. I had gotten feedback that people weren’t really understanding the Grey Gardens inclusions, or why they were related to these other things. The conceit of “Universally Relatable Writing Prompts” is a little axe I’ve had to grind forever. All through schooling, you get asked to provide answers based on assumptions about your personal life. This, too, is a kind of mask. Being able to write in the voice of an academic prompt is a way to include some biography, and some pop culture stuff, without it being a declarative thing of “this happened to me.” The joke of it, too, [is that] they’re all highly specific things. We don’t all have the same lived experiences. There’s this pushing away gesture from that, but through the long list of things described, it does provide intimacy with the reader.
Rumpus: One line from the poem, “Universally Relatable Writing Prompts Part II” says: “Write about all the time being a very good compliant useful child/employee/tenant did not prevent you from getting kicked to the curb.” Does this feel like a thesis statement for the collection? An accurate driving force?
Rogers: I tried to summarize this in the back cover copy as “codependent and transactional relationships.” It’s a power dynamic I’m interested in because I’m disturbed by it. I see this playing out at very different levels in a person’s life. It’s this feeling that you are simultaneously essential and worthless—maybe in your family, at a company you work for, as a tenant, as a citizen of a country. [There is an] idea that you are [only] as valuable as you can be of service to something or someone else. The entity with more power determines this morality around your behavior. It’s seen as a virtue to give all of your time away to a company you work for. You’re a “better person” if you work after hours and are available at night, and on the weekends, but better to whom? And to what end? And you can buy into that, and live by that moral code, but ultimately playing by the rules doesn’t protect you from being discarded. It might seem like a way to accumulate some of the power that may protect you, but the real power is ever being able to say no, or drawing boundaries and limits. Sometimes the way you can do that is by making fun of things, or agreeing verbally to something, but privately going your own way. That’s why I’m interested in the wisecracking voice of the collection, and these absurd gestures. I see them as an antidote to compliance as a virtue.
Rumpus: Simultaneously funny and devastating, there is an almost acidic sense of humor being utilized to mock late-stage capitalism and misogyny. What did your use of humor mean for the collection?
Rogers: There are a few different humorous voices and gestures. Making fun of the system might be the only way to break yourself out of it and encourage others to do so. I saw a post recently about how fascists don’t like to be laughed at. The way a movement gains power is by everyone agreeing it’s serious and beyond reproach. If you find something ridiculous, it doesn’t have as much power over you. There’s the power of laws and force, but it doesn’t have power inside you—it doesn’t have your buy-in. Being able to say [these] things are ridiculous is a strength. Especially if you’re in a position without other forms of recourse. You can’t force someone to see you as a human being if they don’t want to, but you can find them ridiculous and find others who see the absurdity in that.
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Author photograph courtesy of Sarah Lyn Rogers
