'There is Hope, But Not for Us:' A Review of "The Blue Cherub", by D.M. Rice

“We are,” he said, “nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that rise up in God’s head”. This reminded me of the worldview of the Gnostics: God is an evil demiurge; the world reflects his fall into sin. “Oh no,” [Kafka] said, “our world is just a bad mood of God, a bad day.” — “So outside of this world manifestation, which we know, would there be a world that knows hope?” — He smiled: “Oh, hope enough, infinite hope, — just not for us.”

The above quote, attributed to Max Brod, recalling a conversation supposedly had with Franz Kafka, seems to adequately encapsulate the brooding and horrific reality lingering just under the surface of Lombardo's debut collection, The Blue Cherub. It is also the debut collection from our sister publication, Cult (full disclosure), and one of their editors kindly reached out to me in January to solicit a response/review/blurb. And while over half of the year has passed, the contents contained within this poetry collection are no less relevant, and their mounting significance is deciededly oriented around the self-defeating possibilities of hope in such a cruel and defeated society, where those who have "made it" are really just saving face, and the greater mass of humanity toils in an obscurity worse than death. My assessment is that, rather than reading this collection through the lens of contemporary cultural criticism (which is the most direct entry point), it makes more sense as an example of dystopian literature, and should be evaluated as such. 

However, the collection does follow certain norms which are legible as poetic fodder. The surrealistic framing of a life in "Introduction poem" is understated in its sophistication, and over-reaches the immediately proceeding poems in terms of complex diction and the symbolics of substance use: 
Plugged ears lalalala trazodone
when the sun asks where my children are

Blue cherubs enchant
against a coulisse of blind artillery
Here not only is the titular figure, the blue cherub, introduced (this conceit becomes especially important in the collection's final act), but other relevant motifs are as well. This "blind artillery" resonates with the consistent sense of an external antagonism that struggles to be defined in its ubiquity, while "children" as a motif are repeatedly referenced throughout the text, but especially in the first section. The outlook is quite bleak, as reflected by an epigraph from Cioran, a famous anti-natalist. Sometimes the reference seems to be to real offspring, as in "Smoking:"
My children, some nights
you will starve
because i resent time
and i resent time’s loss
and i can’t act otherwise
and somebody found me
upright gorey behind the dumpster
sliming my lips with pure sulfur
While at other points the conceit is more abstract and opaque, as in "Travelling:"
i’m still strangling some

nation because my children you are

dopesick or hungry or because

you need cash between

your teeth to stunt the taste
In both poems, there is a through-line of substance use (and abuse) that overwhelms any notion of normative functioning. Substances counter-act the "blind artillery" of contemporary experience (so much suffering, so much death, it can scarcely be believed or contained), but distort the narrative framing, de-centering the moral and conceptual aspects of this work ("i wash my children in blindness//like bunk photographs"). "Children" in this case might also be literary off-spring, future generations of readers, or the next generation as an abstract. But there is a darkness, if not a depravity, endemic in the externalized violence, that nonetheless seeps into the frame narrative, and persists throughout the collection. These representations (and not only that, but the colors, wordplay, and substances referenced) becoming increasingly nuanced and 'difficult' as the text develops, but the narrative and symbolic threading is perhaps the strongest point of the collection, writ large. The emotional timbre is brooding, convulsive, and unrelenting ("My children//will ramble on a backwards century//their heads reversed with animalic envy"). It is not enough to reference the writing as "melancholic" or "pessimistic." As with Cioran, the scope of the darkness in The Blue Cherub is all-encompassing and quite radical, so as to fundamentally conflict with the ideological (progressivist) view of humanity which was the common American viewpoint coming into the twenty-first century, where so much hope and possibility bloomed in our collective imagination.

While the syntax applied as the vehicle of this analytical perspective is at times opaque ("but human sacrifices don’t rec//ollect My human sacri//fice leaps from billboards"), this generally doesn't deter from the option to take the poems at more or less face value, especially in the first half of the collection. Just as the recurring motif of children becomes ubiquitous in its scope ("i see my children rolling////up the tombstoned driveway"), the collection takes a left turn, and moves into the "Motions" section, where that attention shifts to films, and the section's epigraph (taken from the film "Bright Future") is ironic rather than direct in nature.

In fact, the use of films seems to be a screen for meaning, rather than an articulation of it. Put another way, the threading between sections seems so strong, so abundant, that the epigraphic materials (for example, "after The Hole (1998)") come across as extraneous or, at the very least, 'postmodern' as such. In the traditional model (one imagines George Eliot's obscenely learned epigraphs in Daniel Deronda or Melville's amass of cited materials at the beginning of Moby Dick), these materials broadcast cultural sophistication, poetic influence, or a tangible through-line of contiguous conceptual or literary work. There may be some of that there, but the syllabus of international and action-oriented films doesn't necessarily help to deconstruct the writing itself at all. In the scant instances where I am familiar with the work mentioned, it doesn't seem to inform my reading to nearly the same extent as the aforementioned thematic considerations. Take for example "Off the Ferris Wheel Defenestrated from Her Lethargic Glaze towards the Unforgiving Blacktop," which was apparently written "after Smiley Face (2007)," a film with which I am intimately familiar. Excepting the title, there is little resonance between the film and the lines which are of immediate interest ("When I summer at the mill////cannibals deliver me////baskets of mouldering oranges and cannibals" ; "like a child stranded////inside another////speechless summer...Breathlessly panting////cyclogenictermite clouds"). In these lines we can see another significant theme emerging relating to place and class (to be discussed later), but the previously described interest in 'children' as a symbol and substances as an insufficient coping mechanism in an increasingly distended world seems a much better explanatory mechanism than Anna Faris's stoned rantings about Marx and modernity. This refractive model of generating meaning is surely postmodern, but comes across as a structural, rather than a poetic, necessity for the book's development between sections.

"Where" the narrative takes place is as significant as what is implied by the narrative form itself in this collection. Indeed, Lombardo is not like Italo Calvino, painting invisible cities to idly test the limits of language and demure about lost utopian visions. The roots of how place is represented in this collection are tangible and seemingly binary, even if the distinctions are only superficial in nature (everyone is suffering immensely everywhere, any representations otherwise are only deceptions fuelled to allow the system to persist in its current form). In "Blood Makes Grass Grow Kill Kill Kill," the narrative positioning in Oklahoma where "every dactyl leaks bent//...into//unrequitable prairies" serves as the backdrop for the narrator's pining for eminence: "On a different star i might have a name I might have a city." Yet in the previous poem the foremost association with the city is one of violence and deprivation:
i could break a screwdriver
inside your ignition

and all the poems we wrote apart will melt together
like hot steel
on an untended highway
somewhere below los angeles
animalic, afloat 
As the collection winds down, the notion of place is again explored, but in a manner which implies that the distinctions between viewing points for the apocalypse are arbitrary and irrelevant:
Through new york or rural arizona they recite

Excuses to any empty ear like mine or yours

In baltimore maryland sap accumulates

Inside my motel squat and across

The cheekbones of these memories

Insulated by interminable blindness

The third section again relies upon an ironic framing, with simple declarative titles ironically deployed with a clear satirical bent. This is also where the conceptual and formalistic structures begin to bend and twist far beyond the realistic in interesting, if at times opaque, ways ("I love to take my horse to the beach//I love how she prints her hooves on every child’s dozing face//ugly and unfamiliar"). Again there is an eerie ubiquity of violence, of distorted reality, of substances which fail to alleviate the pain for which they were taken ("Dawn lights another//fruitless cigarette"). This serious reflection on some of the most imminent issues of the day does not condescend to the reader, but the collection really shines in teaching its audience how to engage with and understand the scope of what is being discussed, then continuing to reframe and revisit that content in inventive and interesting ways.

"The Blue Cherub" section itself is, then, is the culmination of all of these complex feelings: of a lost (childhood) innocence, of genius chained to increasingly violent and distorted delusions ("I saw the best minds of my generation..."), of an ineffable beauty that manifests despite the sheer hopelessness of it all. While this beauty does not console, its truthfulness is directly proportional to its social and literary "usefulness," so to speak. As the collection winds down, in "The Great American Pastime," the reader becomes increasingly sensitive to the blue(s) threaded throughout the collection, and their surreal and discomforting beauty:
...Above
the sky’s slurved round
like we’re inside a blue pearl
her & i watching baseball
She drives zealous to the right
and knuckles purple into my eye
like a hypnotism that wastes
eighty years irrecoverable

By the final section, the need for titles and coherent narrative framing is absconded. All of the previous themes and concerns are revivified for a final onslaught, a wall of text (spread vertically, double-spaced) circling its own drain, distorting its own figurations unto the point of surrealism ("Have you ever been carjacked by shedloads of blue mitochondria?"). One is reminded that surrealism, in part, sprang out of the modernist need to flatly reject positivist traditions which were veering ever-more-decidedly into an authoritarianism that was still quite fresh in the public's collective memory. Our concerns are parallel, if not inverted: how can one stop regressive social forces that have been collectively forgotten, such that harkening back to them also involves a certain degree of nostalgia and (ignorant) reactionary enthusiasm? Lombardo notes that the coping mechanisms which are the common lot do not necessarily light the way to liberation. Even taking my reservations in mind, the rhetorical argument of the collection seems to be that conscientious artistic consumption (note the socially-potent themes in the aforementioned films) necessarily persists as a beacon even while society continues to eat itself. These musing lines seem to have something to bear on how this argument plays out in a symbolic sense:
Were I a billionaire i might buy the sun paint it blue

The way billionaires do the way human beings

Porn themselves with fentanyl or sums of money

Or shimmer with termites who could never

Fail to be useless if you haven’t guessed it

Quite yet yes this is another one for me and you

Who in this memory adhere to the blue light’s long

Ouroburos which emerged many

Millenia back with a lesson snagged

Between two topaz fangs as tattered cloth

To torture the days their skinpeeling

Rebirth against one another a permanent

Circulation which dizzies angels low and high

My contention? Well, it seems that the past continues to speak through those sensitive enough to engage with the historical moment beyond superficial appearances. This collection troubles, certainly, but in an informative manner which is decidedly appropriate for the times in which we find ourselves. The resulting conception is two fold: Kafka's dictum that "there is hope, but not for us" might not only be read as a flat rejection of hope in all instances. What if, instead, we saw the line as saying that if hope is to be found, we must ourselves change (and the world must likewise change) in order to accommodate something so radically different. Perhaps this isn't an especially popular reading of these lines, but in light of Lombardo's moving collection, it certainly is a relevant one.