Book Launch: Anthony Thomas Lombardi

Join us for the launch of Anthony Thomas Lombardi's debut book of poetry, murmurations, on Monday, June 30th at 144 Montague Street & via Zoom! Doors will open at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Rhoni Blankenhorn, DeeSoul Carson, John Murillo & Megan Pinto will open for Lombardi. Amina Iro will emcee. Book signing to follow.

Please consider adding a sliding scale donation to New York Immigrant Family Unity Project to your ticket. The NYIFUP provides free, high-quality legal representation to every low-income immigrant facing deportation in the City of New York, as well as to detained New Yorkers facing deportation in the nearby immigration courts in New Jersey. Donations will be sent to the Project via The Bronx Defenders who implement the project jointly with The Legal Aid Society and Brooklyn Defender Services.

Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy. All in-person attendees for events are currently required to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. We will have masks available. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.

About 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

“(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 didn’t know i was holding.”

—Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I’m Told

In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi invites us into an emotional landscape of love and loss, where that which repairs and that which obliterates converges. 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

Charlie Parker said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Anthony Thomas Lombardi’s murmurations is a poet who’s lived it—the poems 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!

About the Author

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a writer, educator, organizer and romantic in revolt. He is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025) and 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. 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, 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, Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He hails from Brooklyn where he lives with his cat, Dilla. He believes in a free Palestine and thinks you should too.

About the Opening Acts

Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. A recipient of fellowships from Breadloaf and Saltonstall, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Rhoni’s poems have been featured in Narrative, the Slowdown, the Margins, Adroit, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Rooms for Dead and the Not Yet, won the Trio Award, and is forthcoming from Trio House Press on July 1st, 2025.

DeeSoul Carson is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford University alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Murillo’s poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. Currently, he is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, Ploughshares, The Slowdown podcast and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

About the Emcee

Amina Iro is a poet, crochet artist, and book editor. A writer and performance poet originally from Prince George’s County, MD, Amina has held fellowships with the Watering Hole, Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Pink Door. She has performed at venues in the US, England, Nigeria, and South Africa. Amina is a graduate of the First Wave program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she studied Neurobiology and English Creative Writing. Her work is published in Reginald and Beltway Quarterly Poetry.

COVID-19 Policy

Effective 2024, all event attendees are required to wear masks due to the current prevalence of cases in NYC. Masks will be available at the door.

The current metrics available, including NYC wastewater data and the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Activity Levels, both indicate high levels of COVID and other illnesses. While your personal risk tolerance may vary, the unmitigated spread of COVID and other respiratory illnesses disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our community—including those who are immunocompromised or don’t have the privilege of paid sick days to heal and recover. We hope you’ll join us in taking the actions we can to make our space welcoming to all and to keep each other safe. Please stay home if you are experiencing symptoms, have a positive COVID test or someone close to you has recently tested positive.

We strongly encourage daytime visitors and workshop attendees to wear masks. Workshop instructors may choose to enforce a more stringent policy at their own discretion. Additionally, workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants.

While we do our best, Brooklyn Poets cannot guarantee zero risk. A risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in all public settings. By entering the building, students, teachers and other attendees accept the risk of exposure and knowingly waive and release Brooklyn Poets from any liability related to COVID-19.

Brooklyn Poets Code of Conduct

Brooklyn Poets will not tolerate any instances of discrimination, harassment or abuse in conjunction with any of our programs. Respect and consideration for others, both within and outside our programs, are core values to be upheld by all participants. Discrimination against and/or harassment of community members on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, religion, age, marital status, veteran status or any other factor is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Program participants are expected to adhere to all federal, state and local laws and regulations. Should a board or staff member, independent contractor, volunteer or program participant be found to violate any aspect of the organization’s code of conduct, Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss them from the program. Consequences may include, but not be limited to, dismissal from the current activity, suspension, ineligibility for all future activities, and/or loss of payment or fees. If you have any issues to report, please do not hesitate to email feedback@brooklynpoets.org, which will send your message to everyone on the Conduct Committee, or if you’d prefer you can contact anyone listed individually here and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.