#crumb-sized

With its musings on elementary school bullies, burgeoning sexuality, and simplified explanations of planetary phenomena, Crumb-sized seems constrained to a specific audience. Nevertheless, Chertok’s poetry is accessible to those who have ever endured suffering, who have ever felt disconnected or alone among a majority. Implicit in the descriptions of “Life on exoplanets” is the isolation, loneliness, and harsh environment which might sprout resignation, or worse, resentment. But despite her disclosure of the 5,400 mph winds on HD189733b (where it “rains glass sideways”), the 500 light-year distance between Kepler-186f and Earth, or the obscurity of Proxima b, Chertok challenges readers to “keep magnifying the universe— / because it’s still expanding, with or without you.”

Bring food to the hill—you all rely on each other. If you collapse or get stepped on, the others will place you on their backs, return you home.

Yet, Chertok avoids challenging “the universe’s most feared unknowns” with naivety. Throughout Crumb-sized, she highlights the truths of skeletal dysplasia while assuring readers that they too can rise above victimization by confronting the black hole “absorbing . . . smile and confidence / and blasting out darkness.” Her greatest moments of triumph (against a competitive and hypercritical society) happen when she communicates self-awareness: a balance between acknowledging her limitations and preserving a conviction to realize “far-fetched dreams.” “Even if all the pain I’ve felt in my whole life doesn’t equal / the pressure an astronaut experiences in G-forces on reentry,” she writes in “Application to NASA,” “still I’m strong. I may be one of the strongest / candidates you’ve ever had.” Drawing from autobiographical memory, Chertok understands that the antidote to disability or disadvantage is less likely to be discovered in willful ignorance of her “misshapen hips” than in honest consideration of all the aspects which shape and structure her identity. In “It should be called womenstruate,” she writes of her feminine self:

This power socket of cum joules, this tingling triangle, this coaxing cave, this primordial pomegranate is not monstrous, is full of sap and blood and ever-expanding, like the universe after its big bang.

“Rikkud,” a poem that invokes Chertok’s Jewish upbringing, explores the tension between her cultural identity and the reality of her disability:

lit in amber. Moths and bats swoop overhead, like us, congregating below on the dancefloor. I’m part of the circle, hands clasped, more Jewish in this two hours of folk dancing every Friday night in the summer than in a synagogue, ancient words I don’t understand swirling in the air.

As the poem continues, the pain of exclusion is made as apparent as pain caused by skeletal dysplasia, and a pervasive sense of disassociation amid communal celebration draws attention to the limitations of both self and society: “the only bonfire dancing. / I watch the others dance / through every song. / Their bodies so fluid / filled with bones their age.”

Ultimately, trusting in one’s own internal foundation emerges as the theme of Chertok’s deeply introspective poetry. It’s how the outcast in “At 13 I lived in the forest” reclaims her agency as a participant: “I shattered / my reflection in rivers and creeks. / At 18 I changed, / stood up on two paws.” This progression toward self-authorship is reinforced as she gains the confidence to pilot her own narrative:

I let my paws sink as deep in the soil as they could. I went to school with other wolves, wrote down my life in the forest to share in writing workshops.

It also runs parallel to Robert Nash’s conception of “the scholarly personal narrative,” a form of confessional academic writing which frames intimate experience within a larger social context such that reader (as well as writer) may gain insight on how to better engage with and make meaning of the world. Bridging science and spirituality, Crumb-sizedsucceeds not simply in its subjective interpretation of objective reality, but also in its consideration of how individual interpretations interact therefore impact one another—perhaps this type of reflection is how moral relativism reconciles with universal truth—perhaps Chertok never intended to comment on moral relativism or universal truth. Regardless, Chertok’s voice is vital to creating a higher resolution image of our human condition.