Paleotempestology

• Paleotempestology
• Price: $10.00
• Bertha Isabel Crombet
• Chapbook - Poetry
• ISBN: 978-1-936196-98-2
• 2018 Winter Soup Bowl Selection

~~~***2018 Winter Soup Bowl Selection***~~~

Paleotempestology, as no one would know, is the study of storms and the central theme rippled throughout Bertha Isabel Crombet’s debut collection. Beginning, very literally, with a poem titled “Waiting for Hurricane Irma” in which she wishes for a “fresh disaster to eclipse [her] old one”, she sets the precedent for the entire book, which goes on to explore emotional turbulence in it’s myriad forms, including heartbreak, memory, and myth. Presented with both whimsy and wit, fear and candor, imagination and certainty, and all via the lens of a Cuban-American woman navigating the often funny and treacherous landscape of dating in the modern world, the poems churn and churn to reveal how both grief and hope can coexist.

A LOOK INSIDE:

WAITING FOR HURRICANE IRMA

Confession: I asked for this. I wished for a fresh disaster
to eclipse my old one. I laid in bed,
red wine stains dappling my sheets,
drunk off hunger after not eating for a week,
and I said Please God, let something more terrible come.
Something bigger than this pain. Anything. Anything.
And God leaned back in his brown leather armchair,
holed and bursting with polyester foam like
cookie dough from a Pillsbury tube,
propped his long feet up on the coffee table
littered in newspapers, and mused
on all of my past ridiculousness:
the midnight bargaining before exams I failed
to study for, excuses, unmet promises of all I’d give up
(meat on Fridays, men, the word “fuck”),
all while maintaining my skepticism. If you even exist,
I’d start every prayer, then do me this solid, will ya?
He was like the year-round Santa Claus whose lap
I got to sit on as soon as I dropped to my knees.
The genie unleashed when I rubbed
the ensorcelled lamp, wrists cuffed in gold,
a prisoner of his own phenomenal cosmic power.
I had this coming. Forgive me. I wanted so badly to mourn
something new, so that devastation
would extinguish all the old ones. Even you.
And God knew I meant business,
that I was all gristle and pulped heart, wrong and wronged,
my eyes two rags wrung and hung
out to dry in the yard, so he said Here comes the storm
of a lifetime. Here’s the catastrophe you’ve been crossing
all your fingers and toes for. And I said, Thank you.

HYPE

Paleotempestology is the study of past tropical cyclone activity, which is to say the study of ancient and recurring storms, which is to say love and other natural disasters. Let Bertha Crombet take it from there. With “gristle and pulped heart,” she “reminds [us] of something that never happened,” and of many things that did: first loves, first kisses, first heartbreaks, first dating apps, Brad Pitt after Jennifer Aniston (but before Angelina Jolie). “Wouldn’t you like me to tell you everything?” writes this witty, astute, and riveting poet. The answer is always yes, always please, always now.

–Julie Marie Wade, author of SIX and Same-Sexy Marriage