murmurations - Paperback

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.

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, author of The Moon That Turns You Back