It’s a Blue, Blue World: Poems and Stories (Jan. 2024) by Colby Flade | Early Review by Nicole Zdeb
Nicole Zdeb | 11/12/2023
How does one find comfort in a world so cold, vast, and lonely? That is the central question the poems in It’s a Blue, Blue World attempt to answer. The poems enact suggestions and present possibilities, but their responses are nuanced. Comfort is transitory; comfort itself is cyclical; and comfort is seldom found in traditional sources, such as home, family, lovers, and certainly not philosophy.
These poems were written during winter, and winter is a generative store of images throughout the collection, providing a thematic coherence. In the notes from the author section, Flade writes: “…i sometimes forget that winter ends, eventually; waking up every day to sheets of ice and blankets of freezing snow, dull gray skies and wicked winds, it all becomes so normal. Add in the loneliness, the isolation, and the death…winter seems so difficult to overcome. but each year, i am greeted with the fact that winter does, eventually, come to an end.”
Winter teaches scarcity and survival; spring teaches renewal. In this tenacious focus on nature as an ontological source, the poems have a Romantic bent. Flade is in the company of contemporary poets like Lang Leav and Nikita Gill, poets who lyrically speak to the heart of human relationships often relying on nature as metaphor and source of inspiration.
Music and musicality weave throughout the poems. The collection opens with “walking after midnight,” a nod to Patsy Cline, the eternal searcher who elevated longing to an art form, and includes “gloria,” beckoning Laura Branigan into the poetic radius. The title of the collection echoes “Blue Christmas” by Elvis and “It’s a Blue World” by The Four Freshman.
“walking after midnight” begins with a nightmare: “i picture myself walking naked in the middle of the street. it’s after midnight.” In the dream, the speaker knocks on doors, waking up the people in sleepy suburbia so that they can witness his social suicide. The speaker plunges the knife he wields into his own gut: “some people scream, some vomit,/some run toward me but it’s too late.”
Toward the end of the poem, we’re presented with one of the core paradoxes of the book:
for, soon after the pain leaves me,
the world fades into blackness, and a scathing heat consumes me: the most
comforting feeling i’ve ever endured.
The notion of enduring comfort is paradoxical, and this paradox sets up the tension that keeps these poems interesting. Comfort comes from great pain; comfort is also, like pain, something to be endured. Comfort is not all it is cracked up to be.
The poem ends not with the suicide, but with the speaker “dreaming of the day i’ll finally be at the center of something.” This positions a speaker that the reader will encounter many times — a speaker searching for space in a world that will only pay attention if the speaker guts himself, a metaphor for writing if ever there was one.
The titular poem, “it’s a blue, blue world,” introduces the recurring theme of the abandoned child, this time personified by a little bird, a dove who is alone in the dirt. There is a photograph of this little bird in the beginning of the collection, a sort of self-portrait of the artist. The bird’s plight is narrativized, the baby bird has been abandoned by a wayward mother who:
just packed up her things and became a
curious vagabond, leaving the little dove alone in
the mulch to fend for himself –
The speaker identifies with the abandoned dove, who at the end of the poem is now:
pondering what could possibly be better
than home…
and why he was not good enough
for her…
In this wintry world where baby birds are abandoned by vagabond mothers, there are moments of reprieve, of beauty, and yes, of comfort. Many of them, in fact. It is these moments that create a counterpoint to winter. There are ports in the storm. One such moment comes in the delicious poem “lemon bars,” a meditation on being an outsider in a familial dynamic and finding balm in baking, transforming mundane ingredients into something sublime:
i measure with my heart;
sugar, butter, flour, eggs,
bowls, knives, pans, heat.
i hold my hands over the stovetop’s flame
and close my eyes,
pretending i’m somewhere else
and irreplaceable.
In this skillful poem, Flade creates a whole world. One of the techniques he uses effectively in this poem and others is incorporating snippets of dialogue. The poem becomes embodied with voices. The voices have no individual identities; they are ambient, almost ghostly, but they speak volumes:
“are you baking something?” they ask.
“yes.”
“what?”
“that is so unlike him…”
Another poem where Flade uses voices to superb dramatic effect is in “the worst week of marcel’s life,” a hybrid work, a stanzaic story, which traverses a horrible week of unimaginable loss in the life of marcel. There’s a farcical aspect, tragedy brought to a cartoonish extreme, to make a salient point about human disconnection. When marcel reaches the end of his proverbial rope and reaches out for help by texting a crisis line after being abandoned by his parents, friends, job, and a recent lover:
an immediate response popped up:
hello! thanks for reaching out today.
we’re here to help. reply stop to cancel.
msg frequency varies. msg & data rates
may apply. we will connect you to a
trained counselor shortly.
Using typographical elements such as bolding and font size, Flade captures the impersonal voice of the system, even when that system is programmed to offer, you guessed it, comfort. One place you can’t find comfort is in the preprogrammed world of bots, canned responses, and message rates. The poem/story is a tour-de-force of tone, presentation, and commentary.
Another place where comfort is scarce is the world of romance. Dating leaves you vulnerable to the wolves and bears, fairytale villains that are all too real. In “affection,” a grizzly bear carries the limp body of the speaker, holds it, offering “strong arms” and “soft fur” before biting and swallowing the speaker whole: “i awoke in his belly/and i was not alone…”
In the poem “big bad wolf,” a predatory and destructive lover takes on the evergreen role of the wolf that preys on the vulnerable. The speaker does not rest in victimhood, though. The speaker turns to poetry to control the narrative:
so when you knock again, i’ll ignore
and turn you into poetry instead,
where you’ll live on a page,
in a book
on my shelf
Take that, baddie! You’re in my world now and in my world, writing is self-preservation, a taming of the wild, and where predators are put in paper cages. Writing offers protection and the perfect revenge.
Sonically, these poems offer much delight. In “glow,” the assonance of the long and short vowels creates a musicality that aligns with the subject matter — small flames:
their tips whip the brick,
and a cyclone of smoke swims up
and up
we place our palms over them
and sigh with fulfillment
This attention to musicality reflects a high level of craftmanship and ear. The sonic richness draws in the reader and enlivens the poems. There’s a payoff to closely reading these poems and the payoff comes in pleasure. As readers we turn to poetry not just for what is said, but for how it is said.
This collection includes poems that vary in form and voice, but they cohere through recurrent images, common themes, and a consistent attention to the music of the lines. They present a speaker who is resilient, often funny, and thoughtful about hope and comfort. These poems don’t offer easy answers. There is no panacea for loneliness, abandonment, and bone-chilling cold.
Hope can let you down, but it isn’t what hope produces that matters as much as having the balls to hope despite all the evidence to the contrary. In It’s a Blue, Blue World, hope is an act of rebellion; what the heart does when it won’t settle for the bullshit rejection, the wolves and bears and abandoning mothers, the world has offered. Hope is what comes after a deep and clear-eyed study of winter. It’s a comforting thought.
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Nicole Zdeb is a writer, visual artist, and editor at Airlie Press. Author of The Friction of Distance (Bedouin Books, 2011) and Tremulous Landscapes (forthcoming from Airlie Press, 2025), she can be found on socials @nicole_zdeb
Colby Flade is the author of The Smell of the Light Blue House in Summertime (2021), Menthol (2022), Short, Sweet, Simple: Love Poems (2022), and The Fly & Odor (Beyond Words Literary, 2023), a collection of two short stories. He is a Chicago-based queer writer and artist. Currently an editor at Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Flade can be found on socials @theflade and at www.theflade.com
