[05/22/2026][INTERVIEW]The Coming Disaster
A conversation with PJ Lombardo
In a past life, I totaled my car on a stretch of I-80 in Pennsylvania that was so flat it could’ve convinced me the Earth was too. I remember standing on the side of the road as they loaded the mangled metal that had been my car onto the shoulders of a tow truck like a slain lamb. Cars passed slowly, drivers staring at, mesmerized by their own luck. I tried but couldn’t put myself back in the exact moment when I knew that I was going to give a 70 MPH kiss to the giant flashing arrow sign. PJ Lombardo’s new collection of poetry, The Blue Cherub from Cult House Books, is that moment. The moment just after catastrophe has found you, but before you understand how.
In April, PJ was nice enough to talk with me about the book and all the disparate things it made me think about.
—Aaron Berry Davis
How long have you been in Baltimore?
PJ Lombardo: I've been in Baltimore three years. I had been living in Chicago prior and they just kept raising the rent the maximum amount every time, like every year, and then one year, it was just a little bit too much. My friend, Austyn, was living here already. She was like, “A room's opening up in my house, and there's no lease. You can just come in." That's exactly what I needed because I was unemployed and about to not be in a good situation in Chicago. But the sky opened up, and I moved to Baltimore, which I love. It's my favorite place I've lived so far.
You’re from New Jersey?
Yes, I'm from Northwest Jersey—way up in the corner where New York, PA, and Jersey all meet. Culturally speaking, a lot different than the rest of the state in many ways. If you ever watch The Sopranos, the “Pine Barrens" episode, that actually looks closer to most of Sussex County than the rest of New Jersey does.
That's interesting.
I'll indulge another Sopranos comparison right quick. I'm 20 minutes away from where Adriana and Tony go to buy coke in one episode: Dover, New Jersey. And they're complaining the whole time. They're like, “Where the fuck are we?" They're whining about it.
Then you moved to Chicago from there?
No, I went to school in PA, middle of nowhere.
Where in the middle of nowhere?
Susquehanna University. It's in Selinsgrove.
Like the Defiance, Ohio song.
Oh, yes, but actually, we're not that close to the river. We're close to another river.
Really?
Yes, I remember there was an oil spill in Pennsylvania one day. Before the news had broke, my friends and I were drinking and walking on train tracks, which is one of the few things you can do in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. We look down, and we cross over this bridge, and the river's underneath, and it's orange. We're like, “What the fuck?"
Well, that brings up one thing in The Blue Cherub that stuck with me: the feeling of looming disaster, the disaster that the future represents, whether it be climate disaster or any of the other broken promises of the future. When did your writing start taking on these ideas?
I've always written about disaster, or the prospect of disaster. A lot of what I do is informed by socioeconomic trends, and I think ever since I came into that type of political consciousness, “disaster" was always the buzzword. People talk about the Long 2014—that we feel stuck culturally ever since the 2010s—and my gruesome inclination as to why that's true is because we're right on the verge of confronting something that's been latent the whole time, but hasn't presented itself as catastrophically as it's going to.
I think just the unfeasibility of the global consumer economy as it exists, it feels like we're reaching this breaking point, and there's trends all over the culture that are echoing what I'm saying, so a lot of this just comes from osmosis. I've always been fascinated by that. And with this specific manuscript, I was also watching a lot of horror films while writing it.
I can see that.
One of the things I would look for when I was looking for a film to write about was if there was some type of catastrophe depicted or suggested on screen. They're not all horror movies, but if they have that suggestion or depiction of catastrophe, that's what made me think, “Okay, I should think about if this can fit in the manuscript somehow."
There's this line in Tremors 2: Aftershocks, where one guy's talking about his ex-girlfriend, and he’s like, “She thought I couldn't live without the threat of global collapse."
Damn. Who knew there was such a perceptive, psychological line in Tremors 2: Aftershocks?
I’m thinking about the frog who doesn't realize that the water’s getting hotter until it’s boiling alive. Did you grow up Catholic?
Actually, yes.
I thought you might have.
I was briefly an altar boy, but they told me no más because I kept fucking up the sequence of events. I got kicked out of being an altar boy. That actually does maybe explain some things about the manuscript. I'm sorry, where were you going with that?
I don't know exactly. I thought you might have from reading the book. Especially because of the recurring motif of the children. There was something very— I grew up Catholic, also. There’s something about the way you were using the motif of children as representative of a lost future that almost felt to me like when I learned as a kid what happens to unbaptized babies. It's just, “Well, they just go to their own purgatory forever.”
Right, yes.
The book got me thinking about our future as that. Like, a purgatory. Do you feel a current relationship to religion at all?
I'm not a religious adherent in any way. I think there is— How do I put this? I want to have a materialist conception of spirituality, if that makes sense. I want to think of it as immanent to life on earth. I'm trying to think about if Catholicism plays into the book in any particular way. I guess the sequence you mentioned, the motif of children, in the sequence Gerunds, thinking about the speaker in that sequence, their strain of resignation leads them to really heavily fear futurity or fear disruption, right? They understand that there is this verge of catastrophe, so they have this paranoid, vitriolic relationship with the symbol of the children, right? I think maybe that is informed by the particularly conservative strain of Catholicism that I had a lot of in my life when I was younger. That definitely wasn't conscious. That is interesting. I'd love to think more about that. Now I work for a Catholic school. I’ve sort of been in and out of Catholic institutions my whole life. I'll say this: I think the massivity and the Baroque detail that is involved in a lot of Catholic art, I do rock with that. The school where I work, they have these Catholic paintings that are really intricate and—
Brutal, usually.
—they have tragedy and sublimity and brutality, yes. Those are all things that I think are probably resonant with what I'm doing, too.
I think about the reliquaries from when I was a kid, how they were so excited to be like, “We have a flake of St. Gregory's skin.” Where do you think your interest in the grotesque comes from?
I think that's interesting, tracing where it came from. I'm not entirely sure. I guess that on the level of poetics, I always loved neologisms. That's like words that you coin to serve a specific purpose. Before I knew what a neologism was, I just called it a compound word technique. I was like, “I came up with this thing." Not true.
I will say I was excited about that practice before I was able to justify it. I was thinking about “How can I put this tool to a productive use? What framework can I use to continue experimenting with language, but not just have it be purely experimental like Ab-Ex work?" I think from there, where I started to put the word “grotesque" to that style was my teacher, Johannes Göransson, in grad school. We were having a workshop, and he used that word to describe my writing, but also the writing of other students in the class in this serendipitous way.
We didn't plan it like that, but we just all were writing these poems that matched certain standards of the grotesque. Do you know where that word comes from, Aaron? The grottos?
No, I don't.
The word “grotesque" was originally used to describe art that was found in these grottos in France, these caves. It's some of the first cave paintings. They would be pictures of anatomy. There are lots of penises and vaginas from thousands of years ago, like middle schoolers scrawling dirty anatomy parts on the wall. It's always been a practice.
They also found these figures that were deer heads with human bodies. Slowly, writers like George Bataille started to piece together this aesthetic that was associated with the grotesque. There are so many different threads there, but I think primarily in art that gets described that way, three major features are hybridity, metamorphosis, and anatomy. When I was writing earlier manuscripts, I was thinking a lot about those ideas.
For me, that ties back to the image of the Wendigo—a shapeshifter, a hybrid. It resists classification or definition. And I think that section is the most hopeful part of the book, where the speaker is finding comfort in this unknowable, grotesque horror. Is that something you were feeling as you were writing this?
The way I think about the three main sequences of the book, prior to the last poem, they're all different views into the same process of resignation and defeat that I thought was widespread politically in the early 2020s while I was writing the book. I wanted to emblematize that through three different sets of motifs. In Gerunds, like we talked about, it's the children motif. In the second sequence, it's the mill, the collapsing house that the speaker is staying in. And in Wendigos (in Love), the speaker is describing themselves as being particularly enamored with another individual, this romantic cathexis that they have.
That romantic cathexis is, in a way, so comforting and muting. It mutes everything else, so that they allow severe collapse to happen around them. They do it at their own expense. One of the first lines I wrote in that sequence was for, “I love my horse," about taking my horse to the beach, and letting it trample on children's faces and stuff like that.
A different interviewer asked me, in that sequence, about love being attached to sources of harm. One of the poems is called I Love the Army. Another is called I Love the Market. The idea is that if you have a romantic cathexis or a cathexis of any kind, you'll let your whole life collapse around you. It can be this really violent thing. I think there is a comfort, this psychotic comfort that the speaker feels, and they're using that to avoid dealing with the catastrophe that we were talking about earlier. That just makes a lot of sense, I think, for certain political threads that exist in contemporary American psychology.
Another one of the notes I wrote down is that each section sort of deals with different relationships to bystanding, to witnessing a collapse. You have somebody that lets themselves feel it deeply and feel the doom deeply, and then you have somebody that is like, “I love the Army. I love the market. I can do this. We can make it through this in some way."
I thought of Thomas Merton and the Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and his idea that modernity turns us all into bystanders, necessarily. Just the scope of it, the scope of the harm that we can cause each other, there's almost nothing we can do on an individual level to stop it, but we still are able to see it, and we're able to feel it, and so we internalize it and become bystanders.
The politics of these poems are obviously important to you. Do you see yourself as any of these strains of bystander, or do you see yourself more in the role of archivist?
Well, I think we all are bystanders, much to our own chagrin. I think that the project of the Enlightenment, which had many of its own problems, was still aimed at using literacy and knowledge and rationality to promote citizen participation in society, right? Now, I guess the briefest way to put that is, it doesn't matter who you vote for—your money goes to Israel. That's more and more of an explicit understanding in the United States of America. We just have that.
We are bystanders, and the people who still invest themselves in two-party politics are people who just want to beat the other team. They think of it like football. I think that we all have been put in a bystander position. I guess I sound like I'm giving people a pass when I say that, but I don't have answers. I'm not a didactic writer.
Sometimes I think, in contemporary society, because we're not confronting the essential catastrophe that is approaching, people always want to justify what they do by saying that it's the most necessary thing to do. I don't think anybody would have a complete political understanding if they just read The Blue Cherub. That's not what I want to give anybody.
Are you a big horror fan, or did it just happen that around this time you were watching a lot?
I started engaging with movies more frequently during the pandemic. Horror movies, they weren't a fixation of mine, really. When I started, the idea of the color blue as a motif came from a movie called Ju-On: The Grudge. If you remember the ghosts in that film, they have this whitish-blue paint all over their body and there's a lot of blue light all over.
In the narrative of the film, those ghosts, they were all victims of a domestic murder. I thought the contrast between the color blue, which is more often associated with melancholia, and the jump scares of the movie, I thought that was a compelling contrast. When I thought about the cultural climate of the time, it felt like we were trapped inside, watching something horrifying happen from the infinite distance of the screen.
That's where I started to put the pieces together for the book. After that, again, when I was watching the films, I wasn't necessarily thinking only about horror movies. There's stuff in there like Happiness, which is not exactly a horror movie, although it's pretty horrifying at certain points, and Smiley Face, which is a stoner comedy. In that movie, the protagonist is at the top of a Ferris wheel, and their family is at the bottom, and they're imagining crocodiles and a moat at the bottom, and they're watching themselves fall off. While they're falling off, this clear Southern California, Gregg Araki sky is behind them. Just the idea of falling in slow motion in a way that was too subdued to really fully experience the horror, that was the effect I wanted.
When were you writing these poems?
I started at the very end of 2023 and went through to early 2025.
Did it feel linear to you, or did it feel like it came in fits and starts?
I think I understood certain features that I wanted to have in the book pretty much immediately. I didn't vary from it too much. The structure was obvious to me from the beginning. In the world we live in, writing is something you do when you get to steal some time back from your overlords. That's always going to come back in fits and starts. There's always going to be times where it's more or less possible.
Most of what I'm doing right now is I'm working on Grotto stuff. I have a new manuscript in progress, and I know what I want to do with it in terms of shape and motif, theme, whatever. It's going to be at least another year before we've got a draft out of that.
How's Grotto going?
Grotto has been just a really gratifying thing to do. My co-editor, Max, and I, when we were both living in Chicago, would talk about starting a literary magazine. I think something that poets do a lot, even poets that I really like, they'll notice a gap somewhere, and they'll just complain about the gap. They'll be like, “Why isn't anybody doing it like this?" or, “Why aren't they doing it like this?" The thing is, you got to be the one. It's you that should be doing it. You know what I mean? When that thought occurred to me at my dead-end temp job, the front desk of Groupon headquarters, I'm like, “Okay, well, let's see what I can do."
“Nobody gets into Groupon without going through me.”
Yes, nobody gets in or out, bro. You gotta get a guest badge, whatever. Terrible flashbacks.
PJ LOMBARDO lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland. He serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. His first full-length collection, The Blue Cherub, is available from Cult House Books. Read his writing in SARKA, Tripwire, Vlad Mag, Dunce, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere. AARON BERRY DAVIS is a writer from Cleveland and a founding editor of Midcult*