Praise for the blue Cherub

The Blue Cherub is a book about having kids, teaching them—and ourselves—how to descend into the hellscape of our American present. And what’s there to say about the future? “I see my children rolling up the tombstoned driveway,” PJ Lombardo writes, as the poems’ domestic scenes tumble into nightmare: “my rotten children / soldered together like a cyclopean eye / driving towards / salvation’s pentobarbital.” Such perceptual saturations in Lombardo’s work create a punk wall of sound in which artist and audience are crushed into communion. But in this book the walls are blue, filled with anxiety and artificial light, wondering what kind of “bloodied gift” we might be leaving behind us.

— Leon Pradeau, Revue Transat

PJ Lombardo’s debut collection left me desolate and full of love. I can only resort to the words of Ross Farrar, who said ‘I caught the world flu. I saw the world blue.’

— Sam Robinson, author of Man with Head Removed

"Lombardo's poetry evokes the prophetic voice of an anachronistic ghost--impossibly present in our world's decay, its overgrowth, the landfills of books, movies, digital media, every dying windmill and abandoned house, yard fulls of rusted electronics. A future already aborted. A past warped by what it has come to create. The Blue Cherub is tender and melancholy, nomadic and reflective, waiting out a flood that might never pass."

— Mike Corrao, author of Being Towards Death

The Blue Cherub pulsates out from an abandoned mill—the axis mundi of a rusted cosmos where planets have stomachs, acne-riddled stars rattle with calcium, and the sun doesn’t shine so much as fry, eat, and ask questions about where your children are. The cosmic and the industrial fuse, corroding and soaked in the same blue: blue rain, blue bodies, blue apples, blue vipers, a blue crash. A chthonic She circulates through the wreckage; feral animals populate it; children hover at the edge of existence. The speaker’s body, by contrast, is undeniably present. Running on lithium and opiates, its misfiring eyes are conduits of truth. Heir to Antonin Artaud and Joyce Mansour, and steeped in horror cinema, PJ Lombardo’s debut builds a language from what perception can no longer hold.

— Karla Kelsey, author of Transcendental Factory: for Mina Loy

These visionary poems depict sensuous wastelands—so lush in their depraved occasions for lightheaded and still lucid beauty—that are voiced in fragments, giving the reader a sense of a whole and its ever-lurking parts in relation. Shuffling in and through the margins of these fragments are—at first—the children, dreaming in an unspecified abundance, that marvel this whole even as it unravels, afloat, into fluid or something blue. I find the children gleaming in the speaker’s “I,” in their every encounter with the Blue Cherub of Light’s Passage, as these pages pulse on and on.

— AM Ringwalt, author of What Floods