Anthony Thomas Lombardi, author of murmurations, in conversation with Chen Chen
When:
Tuesday, Aug 05, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Tuesday, Aug 05, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Porter Square Books
1815 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://portersquarebooks.com/event/2025-08-05/anthony-thomas-lombardi-author-murmurations-conversation-chen-chen
Porter Square Books is excited to welcome poet Anthony Thomas Lombardi for his book, murmurations. Poet Chen Chen will join Lombardi in conversation.
This event will take place at our CAMBRIDGE store. We offer validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. See parking details below.
RSVP to let us know you're coming and to receive event updates!*
*Please note that you will not receive a confirmation email. However, we will send a reminder email one day before the event. Please check your spam folder if you do not see the pre-event email reminder. Better yet, add [email protected] to your safe sender list to avoid PSB event emails going to spam!
ABOUT MURMURATIONS
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.
PRAISE FOR 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
ABOUT THE POETS
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.
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the MFA program at New England College.
PARKING
Porter Square Books: Cambridge Edition offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. Roseland Street is accessible by Beacon Street and Mass Ave. When you arrive at the lot, use the screen on the kiosk to get a ticket.
When you're ready to leave, ask for a validation barcode at the cash register. (No purchase necessary.) Parking is free on weekends and weekday evenings from 6PM-7AM. From 7AM-6PM on weekdays the first 45 minutes are free.
On your way out, scan your ticket at one of the kiosks located in the building and choose "validation." Then scan the barcode your received from us. If you have an additional charge, you will be prompted to pay after scanning your barcode.
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