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 or will soon 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.

Other poems by Anthony Thomas Lombardi in Verse Daily:
May 30, 2021:   "God loves everybody, don't remind me" "a snake goes blind the last time it sheds skin, a body..."

Other poems on the web by Anthony Thomas Lombardi:
"on the first anniversary of my mother's death & ten years after my beloved's suicide, you come over & help me break down boxes in the one bedroom apartment i fled to after the divorce"
Three poems
"the saints who love us & the saints who don't"
Two poems
"the sparrows, the sparrows"
Two poems
"upon hearing Prince sing "Purple Rain" at First Avenue in Minneapolis in 1983, I begin to understand my mother's love life"
Two poems

About murmurations:

"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

"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

"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

"'(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