In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi doesn’t just write poems—he conjures a fugitive gospel of grief, survival, and spirit. This is a book that sings with the rasp of Amy Winehouse’s ghosts, the grind of recovery, the shimmer of queer memory, and the ache of a body caught between prayer and possession. In the ruins of what could not be saved, Lombardi finds what must be sung. These are poems that bleed in lowercase, that bruise and bend syntax until new meaning emerges. A theology of failure, perhaps—but also of flight.
Reading murmurations feels like watching someone exhale a hymn in the dark, unsure if anyone is listening—but they keep singing anyway. I was honored to sit down with Anthony to talk about the metaphors that hold us, the hauntings we survive, and what it means to name the ache without apologizing for it.
Darius Phelps: In “self-portrait as murmuration,” your body and memory shapeshift into swarm, survival, and prayer. How does the figure of the murmuration serve as a metaphor for queerness, grief, or generational trauma in this collection? What does it mean to remember yourself in fragments—and flight?
ATL: The murmuration is a living metaphor for a life built in community and motion. Queerness, for me, isn’t a fixed perimeter—it’s a shape-shifting commons: sub-communities gathering, dispersing, surviving. I grew up learning that survival often looked like the flock turning on a dime—what you’re calling “flight”—and that collected movement is a kind of prayer. Memory after trauma arrives in shards. The body doesn’t hand you an official transcript; it hands you what it needs you to keep. Fragmentation isn’t a failure of recall—it’s a form of truth-telling. Over years, those pieces constellate. The image that changed the book for me: watching a video of starlings when, way in the corner, a hawk snatches one from the sky. The swarm does not stop. That’s the ethic here: the grief is real, the losses are real, and still—forward movement.
DP: Amy Winehouse haunts this collection like a broken psalm, appearing in dreamscapes, stepwork journals, and fugue states. What drew you to her voice as a poetic conduit, and how did her legacy of public pain, addiction, and brilliance inform your formal and emotional choices?
ATL: Amy entered the work before I could name why. I fell in love with Back to Black as a teenager, but what stayed with me wasn’t just the music—it was the cruelty she endured, the spectacle made of her suffering. That haunted me when I lived with active addiction, and it haunts me in recovery.
Formally, the poems began as persona and dream—then shifted: second-person addresses, found-text sutures from her lyrics, and a long “Fragments” sequence that reads like one extended blackout page. I wasn’t trying to reconstruct her; I was trying to hold dignity where the world refused it. On the page, that meant letting feeling precede knowing. The poems taught me their shapes after they were written.
DP: The poems are rich with musical references—Eric Dolphy, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Nina Simone, DMX, Prince. What is it about music and the afterlives of Black artists that enables you to enter what you call “a hymn so tender we forgot what we were mourning”? How do you see elegy functioning in these poems—as lament, invocation, or resistance?
ATL: I learned to write from rap. Seventh-grade education, no formal training—my teachers were Nas, Biggie, Jay, DMX. Breath, break, bar, and bar line. The neighborhood was a music theory I didn’t have language for yet.
Elegy in the book is all three—lament, invocation, resistance. These artists saw me first; their work witnessed me into being. When public narratives demean or flatten Black music, elegy becomes an act of repair. It’s not about sanctifying tragedy; it’s about restoring complexity and agency—offering the dead, and the living, a dignity too often denied. That tenderness you quote is the room we make to grieve without apology.
DP: Across the “moral inventory” poems, there’s a theology of failure—of confession, relapse, survival. How has the language of recovery—stepwork, surrender, higher powers—shaped your relationship to poetic form? Where does poetry pick up when prayer falls silent?
ATL: A mentor once told me—when I was being a young, brash writer—“Your poems aren’t a substitute for prayer. Get on your knees.” He was right. Prayer opened the poems, not the other way around. Stepwork gave me a structure for radical inventory: rhythm, breath, and then surrender.
Formally, that looks like nesting dolls: soundwork and syntax inside ritual and repetition inside larger architectures of saints, mercy, martyrdom. I’m a lapsed-and-returned Catholic; those motifs were in me before I had a theology for them. When prayer goes quiet, poetry listens. It doesn’t answer; it arranges air. It’s the practice that makes surrender legible.
DP: In your epigraph, Louise Glück writes, “I had nothing and I was still changed.” There’s a sense throughout murmurations that transformation arrives not through epiphany but endurance. How do you understand the relationship between transformation and fragmentation in your poetics? What does it mean to be changed and still haunted?
ATL: Epiphany rarely shows up when you’re hunting it. Endurance does. I wanted revelation; life kept handing me another loss, another purgatory. If resilience is the bounce-back, endurance is the long walk through. Fragmentation is the texture of that walk. The pieces don’t assemble themselves in real time; they accrete. Transformation, then, isn’t a single sunburst—it’s the slow choreography of the swarm finding a new shape. To be changed and still haunted is to honor what got you here without pretending it’s over. The flock keeps moving. The hawk is still out there. Both can be true.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of My God’s Been Silent.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a writer, educator, organizer, & romantic in revolt. He is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025) & the founder & director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series partnered with Brooklyn Poets that raises funds for transnational relief efforts & mutual aid organizations. He 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, & community programming throughout New York City & currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Guernica, Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, & elsewhere. He hails from Brooklyn where he lives with his cat, Dilla. He believes in a Free Palestine & thinks you should too.