dave harrity

Books & projects

Cover of Our Father in the Year of the Wolf

“…wickedly primordial, visionary—a psycho-spiritual reckoning…”

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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 braids together motifs from horror, pop culture, and ancient literature into a winding, 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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A Distant Place

“…stay still, let each bright stone cry out, ruin you…”

Read A Distant Place (PDF)

The images and poems in this small book represent the journey of two friends experiencing a world 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 the contrasts and complexities of Israel simultaneously illuminating and inspiring, startling and disturbing. In this work, they array these tensions in a pastiche of images that reckon with vivid spirituality, rich landscapes, intricate politics, and vibrant people.

Order a physical copy by emailing the author.

Cover of These Intricacies

“…elemental, contemplative, and strong—poems hallowed and harsh…”

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These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and spirituality. Set in the 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. 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

These Intricacies is a welcomed new voice in American poetry for the muscle and soul and lyric vision it offers us. Jeanie Thompson

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Public Integrity

“…this document indicates my intention to address the factual side of this matter…”

Read Public Integrity (PDF)

Public Integrity is an erasure of the termination letter written by former Louisville, KY, police chief Robert J. Schroeder to Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in the slaying of Breonna Taylor. As a resident of Louisville, where Taylor was killed, it has been difficult to sustain hope in the city’s leaders, civil system, and police force—especially when Schroeder’s letter 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 of the powerful—to name the irrationality of unjust violence, along with the anger and despair still felt in Louisville today.

Visual miscellany

“…perpetual artistic hobbist and dabbler…”

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 made just for fun, to redirect energy and attention, or to 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 (PDF).

The Louisville Anthology

“…a portrait of a city caught between onward and remember-when…”

Order 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—“from Louisville, not Kentucky.” In this collection of evocative essays and poems by natives and transplants, the anthology offers locals and visitors a closer look at compelling private and public spaces around town, and attempts to articulate what defines Louisville beyond its most recognized cultural exports.

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Cover of Making Manifest

“…a handbook for renewal of creative vision—incarnation at work in space and time…”

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Making Manifest is a craft manual of meditations and writing exercises for individual creative practice and communal formation.

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. Bret Foster, Wheaton College

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

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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Double Vision

“…same blood runs through the veins…”

Collaborations between PYRO Gallery artists and writers from Louisville.

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Cover of Way to Water

“…a cumulative and comprehensive articulation of theopoetics…”

Buy Way to Water

L. Callid Keefe-Perry asked Harrity to contribute several poems for this book, which you can read here. Way to Water traces the development of the field of theological inquiry known as theopoetics and argues that theopoetics offers both theological and practical resources for contemporary people of faith seeking a confessional Christian life that is also intellectually critical. Beginning with the work of Stanley Hopper and the early scholarship of authors like Rubem Alves and Amos Wilder, the text explores how theopoetics grew into a method for theological thought that more fully honors the embodied and aesthetic dimensions of human experience.

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