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Noctuary
Dave Harrity
Accents Publishing is proud to present Noctuary by Dave Harrity, a collection of poems about love, loss, faith, family, and what happens when a life no longer resembles the one we thought we were building. Moving through marriage and its dissolution, parenthood, grief, doubt, memory, and the natural world, Harrity looks at what remains after familiar structures begin to fall away. These poems stay close to the disorienting mess of loss: what we remember, what we relinquish, what we cannot undo, and how we carry it with us into whatever comes next.
What Others Say About Noctuary
In Noctuary, Dave Harrity inhabits and interrogates the retrospective gaze on a relationship, asking quiet but searing questions of this backward glance. Once we know how the story ends, how do we regard what came before? Do we look back and find the end already seeded in the beginning, as though dissolution were inevitable? Noctuary does not seek catharsis so much as a way of knowing and relating to the past. Like the speaker in "An Easement," who stands on a ladder deciding which branches over a home to cut and which to leave alone, these poems dwell in the tension between preservation and release. What emerges is a deeply humane and piercing collection—unwilling to simplify what it means to live in love's afterlife.
—Carolina Hotchandani, author of The Book Eaters
Dave Harrity's striking collection Noctuary captures the roving mind at night while the rest of the world sleeps. These crafted, quiet poems capture grief with a direct elegance, while also speaking to the hope of creating art in the face of loss, both personal and public. Yes, the leaves fall from the trees, but they will live on, much like these stunning poems.
—Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea
Noctuary—a journal of the night, a diary for our travels through the dark. Dave Harrity's Noctuary is a diary kept during the dark night of the soul, that season in life when all seems lost to us, even ourselves. Here, Harrity moves through two of the most painful losses possible, the breaking of family and faith, and much like all of the great writers of the soul's dark night—writers like Christian Wiman, Anne Sexton, and Thomas Merton—Harrity follows each difficult word to find the divine hope that comes from radical acceptance, the tenderness that awaits us all when we simply tell the truth. "O my bright emptiness, / how have you stayed sweet enough for so many insignificant lifetimes?" Harrity asks. These poems vibrate with the hard-earned wisdom that knows: there is no answer to that question, and thank God.
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis
My reading of this book signs me up for loss, both longing and loss, perhaps a shortfall from the traditionalism and religion of the poet's youth and how it has staggered over the years. It doesn't matter why. The imagery in these poems is summoning. It names the terms on which the world is founded, but also indicates a world beyond, thereby touching the mystical just beyond ordinary reach. But it's there. Something greater than anything we ever know is always there before us, and always has an interest in finding us. That's the connection I take from reading these poems. Whether or not we're ever interested in seeking anything beyond our immediate lives, there is something out there that's driven to reach us. Thus, this is a book of reaching and being reached. I am glad we have it.
—Maurice Manning, author of Snakedoctor
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Totality
Lying in bed, you feel the lines
of my palm to name what I'll become.
Asleep or awake, my mind
won't keep still. This eclipse of
rumination, single line of intuition—
a path carved in two. Read it
on my hand: burnt future,
furrowed litany—feathered, chained,
crossed, or petaled. Each mark
a wrong turn or cut string, a sleepwalk
of promises I won't keep. Go back,
I tell myself—go back
through the rut of dusks & dawns,
starlight blooming in the middle
of the day above thin pines, night
animals wandering a kingdom
in me winnowed more each time.
I wander off into the dark, the
needles sapped on my cheek,
the bare rim rising in damp sea mist.
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Details and Ordering
Publication Date: November 1, 2026
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-29-6
Price: $19.00
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About the Author
Dave Harrity is an author, professor, and corporate strategy and culture advisor who publishes widely and teaches in a variety of environments, from classrooms to boardrooms. His poems, prose, and erasures have appeared in Pleiades, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. The author of four previous collections, he is the recipient of an Emerging Artist Award and Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.
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