Distributed by YesYes Books and Asterism
Cover Art: Brooke Shaden
Interior and Exterior Design: Katie Prince
Author Photo: Savannah Lauren
$14 | 38 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-27-1
Poetry l Perfectbound | December 8, 2026
Anthony Thomas Lombardi gives Amy Winehouse what grief can only invent: another Saturday morning. He crowds elegy with sparrows and saints and records alongside the ordinary business of being—refusing to make a public life tidy enough for death to explain it. Lombardi knows that language can give someone an entire second life and still not one more minute.
—Steven Espada Dawson, author of Late to the Search Party
elegy & exorcism ushers readers through the heavy doors of grief—a gentle guidance toward the realization we must face after ineffable love and loss. This lyrical, meditative, and striking collection is scripture in its own right. Honoring memory and experience is a type of surrender, and this collection makes that clear. If the garden Eden is real, I imagine it exists in the world Lombardi creates in this collection. I imagine there are cherry blossoms there.
—Ari B. Cofer, author of Paper Girl and the Knives that Made Her
In these tender, unruly poems, Amy Winehouse gets to grow older. She sings to her flowers, keeps spiders for company, and brings home one record at a time from the Sunday flea market. I loved spending time with this chapbook.
—Noor Hindi, author of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow
elegy & exorcism
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About the Book
In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi imagined an alternate timeline in which the late Amy Winehouse kicked her habits & endured, navigating the long, crooked road of recovery in a series of fractured dreamscapes & fragmented journal entries. In elegy & exorcism, we meet Winehouse five years later through vivid, detailed narratives examining the miracle & minutiae of existence as a recovering addict & the struggle of a meteoric talent attempting some semblance of normalcy. Through encores & requiems this conjured reality of the iconoclastic singer begrudging before the pulpit or clasped in the pillory—sometimes within the same poem—speaks not only to the individual experience of redemption but how quickly our cultural obsession with celebrity can manifest in the refused crown of martyrdom.
About the Author
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a writer, educator, organizer and romantic in revolt. He is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), finalist for the 2026 Balcones Book Prize in Poetry, and elegy & exorcism (a Blue Note Edition Chapbook, YesYes Books, 2026). He runs Verses & Voltas, a poetry service specializing in mentorship programming and manuscript consultations and has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Poetry Society of New York, and community programming throughout New York City. His work has appeared or will soon in Best New Poets, Poetry Foundation, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Adroit Journal, AGNI, and elsewhere.
