Paleotempestology - Bertha Isabel Crombet

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.