“Like Being Trapped in a Beam of Blue Light“

An Interview with PJ Lombardo, Author of The Blue Cherub
By John T. Leonard

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JTL: Your collection repeatedly references the color blue. But it’s not a peaceful, oceanic blue or the rhythmic blue of depression. It’s often a more diseased and industrial shade; even cosmic at times. How does blue function symbolically within the engine of your work? And going beyond symbolism, how does it help to create the atmosphere and theology of The Blue Cherub?

PJL: My fixation with the color blue came from a tragic Japanese horror movie called Ju-On: the Grudge. The tragedy revolves around a haunted house, occupied by the ghosts of murder victims who were killed by a jealous father. Anyone who enters the house is assailed by these spirits and ultimately sucked into their affliction, forced to join them in this ever-souring stain of violent resentment. I was struck by the idea that a grudge could be potent enough to trap anybody, even neutral passerby, in its thrall, merely from proximity. Bitterness is a widespread feature of contemporary American life, and I imagine that this attitude is what the early 21st century will be remembered for. It felt kismet.

All the ghosts in Ju-On: the Grudge have a whitish-blue tint on their skin, and the light design makes copious use of that color as well. Blue is a color more associated with melancholy than horror, so the choice was striking to me, and I thought of it as complementary to its narrative themes, like resignation or decay. I continued watching films with similar themes, and noticed that blue-toned light was a common feature in horror cinema, especially from the 1970s-1990s. Watching these movies in 2026 is more of a nostalgic experience than a thrilling one, and I wanted to write a book that felt similarly: like being trapped in a beam of blue light, watching some catastrophe happen at a subdued distance, as if from a separate world. This is the way large swaths of humankind now relate to their own suffering.


JTL: The speaker in your poems often feels resentful and completely aware of the state of things, yet they’re unable to intervene in the social and environmental collapse around them. Is the speaker meant to be a witness, a participant, or something closer to a casualty?

PJL: I wrote this from late 2023 through the beginning of 2025. Resentment and powerlessness were, and still are, the predominant political sentiments of the time. Most people feel gridlocked by unsustainable contradictions, without the ability to solve basic problems of survival or salve their own alienation. The dream of the Enlightenment, however short-sighted or underdeveloped, was to make collective emancipatory projects possible through enhanced literacy. This failed, and now, as mystificatory power structures advance, demoralization and defeatism spread, causing individuals to lash out paranoid or sink into hostility or decay. The speaker, like you or I, is a witness, participant, and casualty in this process all at once.

In The Blue Cherub, each sequence of poems examines a different permutation of that phenomenon. For example, “Gerunds” uses the motif of children to explore the speaker’s fear of the future. Those “unsustainable contradictions” I mentioned earlier will reveal themselves in increasingly volatile and catastrophic ways; the speaker dreads this more than they understand it, so their attempts at intervention collapse into psychotic fragments.


JTL: You reference film, war imagery, and economic language in ways that feel both contemporary and mythic. What kinds of source material are inspiring and feeding into this collection?

PJL: The film ekphrastic sequence, Motions, was an inevitability: I was watching a ton of movies in my collapsing Baltimore house and writing a book about what people feel in the face of collapse. Whenever a film would depict a catastrophe- injury, fiasco, collision, etc.- I would make a note of it and write the poem later. These films were the inspiration for those poems, and I took some descriptive material from them, but I don’t think the relationship is “integral,” and the poems hopefully stand on their own.

I am a materialist, so the text’s themes of resignation, defeatism, obsession and corrosive introspection are derived from political realities, which are my primary inspirations. This is where the war-related or economic language comes from. I’m not somebody who writes about their personal history, although everything’s filtered through my own experience and attitude. I want to write a mythic contemporary; I love myth, enchantment surrealism, all that. I want to cook a caustic, vitalizing myth and launch in the eye of the demiurge.


JTL: In “I Love the Market” and “I Love the Army,” love is attached to institutions that produce harm. Is that irony, critique, or an attempt to capture something more uncomfortable about dependence on those systems?

PJL: Before I began The Blue Cherub, I read a book by Eva Illouz called The End of Love. I don’t agree with everything Illouz writes, but that book made a strong impression on me. Romantic conventions are downstream of power, and while certain manifestations of love can be redemptive, the feeling itself guarantees nothing. No system of ethics can be established prior to understanding that immediate feelings can be corrupted by what Adorno might call “the Untruth.”

Love is attached to institutions that produce harm. This unfortunate fact has been a source of immense, unfathomable tranches of pain throughout human civilization. The poems you reference are from a sequence called Wendigos (in Love), where resignation leads the speaker to vacuous, corrosive romantic fixations, to their own great expense and that of others. There’s some affective irony between the jejune titles and the content of the poems, but it’s not “sarcasm:” love is dangerous in the world we share.


JTL: What poets or artists have most changed the way you think about language?

PJL: On the level of poetics: Aime Cesaire, Paul Celan, Unica Zurn, Ikkyu, Marina Tsvetaeva, Cesar Vallejo are the artists likely most influential to my mechanics.

Aside from other poets, I’m inspired by the dexterity and experimentation deployed by more contemporary, psychedelic iterations of hip-hop music. The jagged sound of 90s post-hardcore bands is something I’ve worked to emulate over time, through lineation or fragmented language.

Most importantly, I’ve been too lucky with teachers: Karla Kelsey, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Goransson, Orlando Menes, so on.


JTL: Across the book, it feels like pressure is constantly building from the environment, the economy, and the mind, but it never really lets up. When you were putting the collection together, were you trying to shape a clear arc from beginning to end, or keep the reader inside that same ongoing pressure the whole time?

PJL: The shape of the book was apparent to me early on: each sequence attached to a motif so that readers had something to hold onto, even when the poems themselves are more unwieldy or abrasive. Once I understood the “voice” of the book, I wanted to explore as many permutations of it as possible, rather than introduce a narrative arc, which might complicate the reader’s experience. This did result in a “permanent pressure” over the book, like an atmospheric drone, which is (intentionally) exhausting. All my favorite works of art have left me feeling depleted; I love massivity and scope.


JTL: What role should discomfort play in poetry (or art in general), and do you think it should challenge the reader despite the risk of pushing them away?

PJL: As my previous answer probably indicates, I have an affection for disquieting art. I want to engage with and create abrasive poetry, because challenge, the capacity to surpass oneself, belongs in literature. This has nothing to do with “discipline,” but it does have to with love. To borrow a quote from one of my favorite poetry collections, Jon Leon’s The Malady of the Century: “Why would people sell themselves short and not just live a life of creative glamour?”

I want to live in a literate world; coastal tech oligarchs, with their defense contracts and psychotic immortality fantasies and endless streams of rent, are horrified of this because a literate populous is capable of devoting themselves to confrontation. Split the seams of the commodity’s false promise and let fall whatever will. This is easier said than done, and there’s no way to get there without tragedy. Engaging with tragedy
means you have something worth living for. I want vital, confrontational literature. I wish my writing was even more discomforting.

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Leaving

I sleepwalk gradual through some cavern’s throat
bellowing prelingual

I unravel an abandoned oilfield’s curse

The moonlight dusts all my children
salmonella blue

blue like millennia in solitary
while soldiers flicker
from born to dead
on repeat like one slouching wheel

like how every morning
when i wake
up blueblack memory
devastates my childish face

Abandoned estates clone themselves to atmospheric extinction

The oilfield’s curse carpets
all eternity

tattered with useless remorse

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I Love the Market

like flinging darts in a blackout
at three in the morning when the sun’s as dead
as any grandfather, pining after
inoperable pinches of time In new
york city where barrels of oil
pirouette and piddle upwards
her hands wrench soiled air
Her every move a droplet out
the gruesomest nostril
of sun and seppuku
If anybody might spare
seventy-five trillion dollars
her and i could found a planet where
robust horses bubble like boiling water and where
the apes shimmer and chatter in
unimpeachable harmony

Else we could purchase
a fleet of boats
stuff them tight with speculation
Mail them to weather stations
everywhere, like news of war
like natural gas
from your diaphragm to your brainstem

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I Love the Army

Her vaporsoft hands around
an enemy tree’s bluing neck

She nurses me at the mall
She cradles civilians
in their nursing homes
Drones hector above
like many lingering grudges

She says You better
game out steady
before that casket croaks

cause your next ocean is
your last dollar
on one
ceaseless repeater

like bayonets
through civilian shoulders

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I Love the Blues

She leans on a bunk lightpole
and links to passing eyes like What do you need?

Millions of blue bodies
bent with poppy seeds
bend like poppy stems
as a light rain sways

She scans passerbys for runny bruises
for loose bluejean pockets

When she tongues their bruises
she pinches their cheeks
And when she tongues their pockets

she slips them the blues,
strangles them mute
for the rest of their lives

and peels open her umbrella’s face
rotund as
an opiated planet’s
or the rectum of a giant
who sprays numbers
through his mildewed saxophone

just the way
senators spray
numbers at families
through their pixelated barrels

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