About the Book
murmurations navigates the fractured intersections between addiction and grief, class and community, where the lyrical lives in the blasphemous and our invocations summon ghosts instead of saints. By seeking the liminal spaces where survival and surrender blur into one, murmurations pursues questions over answers, praises the angels that abandon us, bind metaphor and hallucination into a kind of communion. Through whispers beneath locked doors and lights that crawl through the dimmest hallways, we explore an alternate timeline where the late singer Amy Winehouse did not die but got sober, highlighting the confusion, mystery and messiness of recovery and our time ephemeral together, brief and desperate as prayer.
In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi invites us into an emotional landscape of love and loss, where that which repairs and that which obliterates converge. With haunting imagery and steadfast reflections on desire, memory, and grief, Lombardi braids a stunning tribute to surrender. "(O)nce," he confesses, "i let a feral animal claw my face, a ferocity i refused to disrupt." murmurations is a breathtaking testament to the endurance that comes with reassembling fragments of what we've been given-or left.
-Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back
About the Author :
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series partnered with Brooklyn Poets that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations; has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Florida State University, Polyphony Lit's apprenticeship programming, and community programming throughout New York City; and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.
Review :
murmurations is a book that is so richly populated: with images, with formal brilliance and inventiveness, with ghosts, with place, with the living. This book balances it all, with flair, flourish, and a true sense of care.
-Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster
Charlie Parker said, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." The poems of Anthony Thomas Lombardi's murmurations testify to a life spent diving cheekfirst into the world-gorge, the world's gorging. "the risen glowed all around me, not one halo in the air," Lombardi says in one poem. In another: "i have walked water parted so long, i've become the shore." There's so much here at which to marvel, so many lines to pin to a cork board and chant into sleep. Lombardi's music testifies: this poet has lived it. murmurations is sweeping consolation, a sublime triumph.
-Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
"(F)or centuries nostalgia was considered a disease," writes Anthony Thomas Lombardi in his remarkably musical and surrealist debut. And yet the speaker returns. Returns to home, to school buses, to dreams and boxing matches in films, to under the bed, to a bathtub filled with jewels, to grocery stores where they are loved. An eccentric imagery runs through the book where the terrestrial meets the divine and so the moon, cheery and mouthy, is tucked into unsuspecting lines, "sacrificial insects" show up as martyrs, and "God's rosewater" drips to baptize the most unexpected scenes here on earth. What underlies these poems is an exhaustion not with living, but with an unbearable aloneness that feels more like exile: "in the forest of my final exile/ it was loneliness i learned/ as darwinian-every storm growling." The speaker faces off with themselves, line after line, poem after poem, but with a survival instinct built on bittersweetness of "a lone blue note/ a breath i did know i was holding."
-Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told
