murmurations

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