dave harrity

Get Our Father in The Year of The Wolf

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf tells the story of a cursed father and son—monsters forced to relive the sins of generations past. Through cyclical, lyric poems, Harrity deftly braids together motifs from horror, pop-culture, and ancient literature into a winding and complex narrative about the trauma and fragmentation of a family, our animal commonness, the chaos of our hidden violence, and the brutalities of our histories come back to haunt us.
 

“[These poems] have weight and body and funk, and they billow. When you read them you want to eat and scream, preen and sex. Read them … where the throng of human stinks the best.”
—Matthew Lippman

“Our Father in the Year of the Wolf is beautiful. But its beauty is its own: These poems refuse the easy richness of lyrical language while retaining the rhythms of lyrics of high intensity.”
—Shane McCrae

“These mysterious [poems], lush and surprising, dramatize the corporeal manifestations of our most primal emotional and spiritual natures. How like us these formally inventive poems look on the page: broken, yet whole.”
—Martha Serpas

"If not for the resilience of the speaker, the resourcefulness of the prosody, I might be at a loss. Harrity reckons with a father-wound so brutal that it has left him not only raving but vulnerable and exposed."
—L.S. Klatt

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An interview with Accents Publishing.

An interview with Poetry Matters. 

Read some of the book here.

Click here to view a PDF of A Distant Place

Order a physical copy of A Distant Place by emailing the author.

The images and poems in this small book represent the journey of two friends experiencing a world that is at once familiar and strange. In June 2017, Michael Winters and Dave Harrity traveled to Israel, joined by their spouses and several other artist friends.

They found that the contrasts andcomplexities of Israel were simultaneously illuminating and inspiring, startling and disturbing. In this work, they hope to array these tensions in a pastiche of images that reckon with vivid spirituality, rich landscapes, intricate politics, and vibrant people.

Get These Intricacies

These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and spirituality. Set in shifting, vibrant spaces of a rich Kentucky landscape, and wrought with metaphysical crisis, this collection charts the slow, seismic shifts of growth bound up in understanding the nature of home.

"This collection of elemental Kentucky poems will land "like starlight in your throat."  You will want to sing Dave Harrity aloud to find that "words have wombs," that what he calls the dusk in our bodies, our "cairns of guilt," still birth and mark dim paths of light.  These Intricacies will clear a way into your own and leave you grateful for each twist and sudden turn."
—Paul Willis

"In these poems, Dave Harrity invites us—into the poems, yes, but also into thought and quiet and a contemplative solitude rare in our century. Here is a poet attentive to the worlds beyond us and the worlds within us. Here are poems that appreciate nature’s perfection and life’s imperfection."
—Lynn Domina

"Intricate only begins to describe the delicate, strong, interlaced qualities of Dave Harrity's poems. Because he values this world in all its complexity, Harrity refuses to reduce any part of creation to a single feature. "
—David Wright

"Dave Harrity metes out his keen sense of our material reality in These Intricacies with an undeniable spirit-eye: a gun shop houses beasts, the throat starlight; guilt builds a little cairn, belief a hand of wings; the body makes room for dusk but cannot deny its uncertain history—those “many accidents it took to make this skin.” I’m punctured by all that’s hallowed and harsh in these poems. What’s more: I’m thankful."
—Susanna Childress

"These Intricacies is a welcomed new voice in American poetry for the muscle and soul and lyric vision it offers us.  Not may poets today will write a long, complex line of questioning, digging, and seeking visceral answers to spiritual questions, ways to bury doubt or reveal belief, as Harrity does."
—Jeanie Thompson

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Materials:

An interview with Accents Publishing.

Info at Cascade Books

A video interview here.

Reading: "Naming the Stars"

Reading: "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum"

Reading: "Poem to Usher in the Season"

A few poems via Englewood Review of Books

Read a review from The Cresset

Read Public Integrity here.

Public Integrity is an erasure of the termination letter written by former Louisville, KY, police chief Robert J. Schroeder to Brett Hankinson, one of the officers involved in the slaying of Breonna Taylor. As a resident of Louisville, where Taylor was killed, it's been difficult to sustain hope in our city’s leaders, civil system, and police force. Especially when the letter written by Schroeder remains the only punishment Taylor's murderers have received to date, even as documents released by the Department of Justice confirm the flagrant abuses so obvious to Louisville citizens. Public Integrity seeks to use the language of power—and the language of the powerful—to name the irrationality of unjust violence, along with the anger and despair still felt in Louisville today.

I love tinkering with all manner of artistic ephemera and think it’s important to try one’s hand at other work, even if it’s just made for fun, to redirect energy and attention, or slowly but surely work on a tangential artistic aspiration or interest. I also think it’s important to share in order to perpetuate awe, conversation, and a healthy sense of diffidence.

Here are a few visual ramblings.

See the essay published in Ninth Letter.

Order The Louisville Anthology from Belt Publishing.

Edited by Erin Keane, The Louisville Anthology asks “What is Louisville’s identity in the twenty-first century? Is it the southernmost midwestern city, the midwestiest southern town, or somewhere in between? Living on the border of two regions creates a hybrid sensibility full of contradictions that can be difficult to articulate beyond “from Louisville, not Kentucky.” In this collection of evocative essays and poems by natives and transplants, The Louisville Anthology offers locals and visitors a closer look at compelling private and public spaces around town. It’s an attempt to articulate what defines Louisville beyond its most recognized cultural exports.

Get Making Manifest

Harrity's writing reveals him to be an impressively mystical counselor, but usually he is attentive to his readers in a pragmatic way—he wants to help them become more attentive themselves, to words, but also to the world, and to the way we honestly see the world—to ways we may be called to speak for the world."

—Bret Foster, Wheaton College

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“I think many individuals and groups will point back to Making Manifest years from now and see it as a beginning—a renewal of creativity and vision.”

—Michael Winters, Photographer and Visual Arts Director

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"In this book … a master leads you in putting many parts of your soul together—incarnation at work in space and time!"

—Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation

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Materials:

Review from Englewood Review of Books

Review from Books and Culture

Collaborations between PYRO Gallery artists and writers fromLouisville.

See a layout of the book at Blurb.

Read a Courier-Journal article about the exhibition.

View the layout crafted by me and CJ Pressma, which was a 3D piece hung from the ceiling.

Buy Way to Water and connect with L. Callid Keefe-Perry.

Callid asked me to contribute several poems for this book, which you can read here, and a few in These Intricacies.

Way to Water has two primary intentions: to trace the development of the nascent field of theological inquiry known as theopoetics and to make an argument that theopoetics provides both theological and practical resources for contemporary people of faith who seek to maintain a confessional Christian life that is also intellectually critical. Beginning with the work of Stanley Hopper in the late 1960s, and addressing the early scholarship of key theopoetics authors like Rubem Alves and Amos Wilder, this text explores how theopoetics was originally developed as a response to the American death-of-God movement, and has since grown into a method for engaging in theological thought in a way that more fully honors embodiment and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. Most of the extant literature in the field is addressed to allow for a cumulative and comprehensive articulation of the nature and function of theopoetics. The text includes an exploration of how theopoetic insights might aid in the development of tangible church practices, and concludes with a series of theopoetic reflections.