American Apocalypse: The Blue Cherub by PJ Lombardo – Sofija Popovska

This review originally appeared in Expat Press. Read it here.

THE BLUE CHERUB is stitched together from the bruises of impermanence & eternity. Its beauty is a nerve-cry and a bloodied smile. Its eye is a tumbleweed through abject regions, “the ruins of…people’s lives” where “senators spray numbers at families through pixelated barrels.” Its voice is a tightrope walker between the casual verdict of bullets and the carnage of consciousness. Its heart is a fallen tightrope walker; a mangled angel in “a dented chest.” THE BLUE CHERUB strums the viscera of a life lived in the shadow of “an abandoned oilfield’s curse.” It is a heartbeat in the stillbirth of eternity. A blinding glimpse of a vast machinic heterolith “tattered with useless remorse.” THE BLUE CHERUB is a mouthpiece through which the world groans, like “fighter jets grieving forward, uselessly.” THE BLUE CHERUB is a book of revelation. THE BLUE CHERUB reveals that the sunrise is actually an explosion. THE BLUE CHERUB sings a forlorn ‘love song’ to a great annihilator, suffused with “the tar in her mouth,” “the streams of her sunny piss,” the “blues” she “slips [people]” when “she tongues their pockets.” THE BLUE CHERUB sings a forlorn love song to “animal stillness… like the long light’s slide across my dimwood floor.” THE BLUE CHERUB names every atom of evil, “uninhibited by the eunuchs of ambition.” THE BLUE CHERUB is a burning photograph showing the blue overhead lighting of the state apparatus raining down like a guillotine. THE BLUE CHERUB writhes in the here & now because “EVERY ROAD IS ONE DEAD EXIT.” THE BLUE CHERUB is a reminder of the lost art of “gallant criminality.” THE BLUE CHERUB is the seriousness of laughter. THE BLUE CHERUB is the elegiac laughter of disintegration. THE BLUE CHERUB strangles its children because it can see the future (and it is blue). THE BLUE CHERUB paints the evening of the world in oracular, fleshy strokes. THE BLUE CHERUB is an American apocalypse. THE BLUE CHERUB is the flesh made word.