Cosmic Tantrum: A Book Launch Featuring Sarah Lyn Rogers, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Gabrielle Bates

7PM AT OPEN BOOKS

Join us in celebrating the launch of Cosmic Tantrum (Curbstone Books), Sarah Lyn Rogers's debut full-length collection—a tragicomic exploration of codependent and transactional relationships, and the myths we make of ourselves and others. Featuring readings from special guests Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Gabrielle Bates!

A reading, free & open to the public

**Masks Required**

“‘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

“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

Sarah Lyn Rogers is an NYC-based writer, editor, and tarot reader. Her editing credits include books for Soft Skull Press, 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 wrote the chapbooks Inevitable What (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the Catapult column 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 out now from Curbstone Books.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of six books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her most recent title, Touching the Art, was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, which takes place in Seattle (and New York), will be out in November.

Gabrielle Bates's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review. Her debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Alabama, Bates is currently based in the Pacific Northwest, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. You can follow her on ig (@gabrielle_bates_) and twitter (@GabrielleBates).