The Emptiness Inside: A review of The Blue Cherub by PJ Lombardo

This review originally appeared Hannah Smart’s substack @howlingfantod You can read it here.

I am not a poet. I don’t read much poetry. I have never written critically on poetry before. These things alone probably make me not the most qualified person to author the review you’re about to read.

I am, however, a fan of linguistic beauty, and as I understand it, good poetry is just linguistic beauty turned up to eleven. And if linguistic beauty is how you judge poetry—and it should be—then PJ Lombardo’s collection The Blue Cherub, now preorderable from Cult House Books, is a very good book. I could probably end my review there, but it wouldn’t be much of a review.

Instead, I’m going to approach the book as a collection of moments of linguistic beauty. Outlining a few of these moments, I hope, will capture some of the essence of what it feels like to read this book.

My instinct is that this is a very nihilistic collection. It speaks to some sort of intangible emptiness. I’m not sure I could defend that opinion in a concrete way. But I can point out a few things I noticed.

Termites proliferate this collection. For example:

and I wag my chainsaw hypnotic

down the frostbitten staircase

at all the milling termites

and await a morphine pellet

And again:

Past the ceiling

of some nameless disaster

doowop termites twirl offbeat

And again:

Now mailmen don’t deliver here be



cause termites loiter

I counted twenty mentions total, most of them within a very narrow span of the book. It almost felt like too much. Still, the image of eating away—of hollowing out—feels pertinent in a collection that is largely about emptiness. One can almost imagine the termites hollowing out the physical structure of the book, such as in that last excerpt, in which “because” is broken not only into two different lines but into two different stanzas.

The way Lombardo breaks stanzas contributes to the sense of emptiness. Oftentimes, he adds an extra space where there should be none. In “Admiring,” “Biking,” “Traveling,” and many others, each line forms its own stanza. And yet the poems’ contents span multiple lines. Take a look at this example from “Traveling”:

it’s alright to go to the horreum

and it’s alright to fill a jettank

while remorseless

vultures spiral vamp and

bluely collapse inside

your house in cinders

your walls of paper stank of disintegration

The stanza separation, coupled with the lack of punctuation, means you’re constantly changing how you parse the poem. Is there a sentence break after “inside”? After “your house” After “cinders”? The words’ essence evades interpretation; all that’s clear is a sense of destruction—everything is collapsing, in cinders, disintegrating.

In “Poaching,” we get a series of symmetrical lines—

rustbelt slush

taloning sediment

palmful by palmful

he rides the scratches

—which devolve into asymmetry and irregularity the way the breathing of a poached animal might:

he saw three eagles, their faces

shot with caprice

he said they were feathered with brick and scabies and cobalt and frost and slowness

he said they were smoking tinfoil popcorn and ammonia

Of course, when I reached the end of this poem, I realized it’s not about poaching animals but poaching eggs. I’d really thought it was going to be about poaching animals. Perhaps this confusion is deliberate.

A sense of dissolution is also evoked through the lines’ infuriating refusal to conform to a normative structure. In the following passage from “Smoking,” we get a near-perfect rhyme and a near-perfect couplet—the first line is nine syllables, while the second is eight. That one-syllable difference feels a bit like when you’re climbing a staircase and think there’s an additional step when there isn’t:

upright gorey behind the dumpster

sliming my lips with pure sulfur

The way Lombardo manages the transitions between couplets also creates a termite-like hollowing out. In “Fell from Above to Collect in Pestilent Pools Between the Ankles of the Abandoned,” we get the following passage:

I fasten a spaceheater, choked with dust,

to the top of the mill

like a trepanned headstone

so that



so that when i peer at the varmints

aswim in the street



the loose whirr of asphyxiated love

peers with me

Here, the repetition of “so that” across stanzas leaves us hanging. The passage reads like a voice trailing off and then finding its footing again in the next stanza. A similar effect happens at the following break. We want to know what occurs when the narrator peers at the varmints aswim in the street. The break forces us to bask in emptiness and uncertainty.

On the individual word level, we also get some cool inventiveness. My favorite Lombardoisms are “corneafrying,” “jettank,” and “giraffeteeth.” The way in which Lombardo smashes two-word nouns into single words manipulates how you feel a line’s image—truncates that brief period between words where you’d typically stop. It’s a rare case of Lombardo removing emptiness rather than creating it.

The collection’s last poem, entitled “The Blue Cherub of Light’s Passage,” makes up the entirety of the book’s final section. There are no subtitles, and every stanza is exactly a line long, but there are often interesting things happening on the page level. Some pages are completely full while others only contain a few stanzas. The page breaks make the epic feel almost episodic—most new pages begin a new sentence/idea, though sometimes the new pages feel almost like continuations of what came before—e.g.

Glaring at movies like former employers



Clamoring off wooded mountains



To the bay wherefrom once human beings declared ascent

[page break]

Hauling a banner tattooed USELESSNESS



To terrorize baffled passerbys with shoulders



Riddled with stray questions like



Could light sweat? if light had flesh?

What all this adds up to is a collection that wouldn’t work as anything but poetry. And that’s a quality I often feel with all my favorite works of art—my favorite novels wouldn’t work as anything but novels, my favorite films wouldn’t work as anything but films, my favorite songs wouldn’t work as anything but songs. Lombardo maximizes the unique strengths of the form—enjambment, space management, rhythmic parallelism—and uses them advantageously.

Most importantly, the collection downright pleasurable to read. Once you surrender to the collection’s overwhelming emptiness, you can bask in the mastery of Lombardo’s language, his spacial awareness, his imagery, and his termites.