FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Apr 2025
A DREAMSCAPE OF MIDLIFE, MEMORY, & MEANING
POETRY, SOUND, VISION COLLIDE IN NEW WORK BY LUKE KURTIS
bd-studios.com is excited to announce a harras, a short film, experimental album, and chapbook collection of nine surreal and absurd poems where equine-themed imagery transports readers into a bizarre realm of angels and assassins. The resolute horses of this dream-like world carry readers through themes of loss and grief, loneliness and solitude, resilience and strength, love and longing, and freedom and transcendence. These left-field works find meaning in the poet’s multidimensional and existential crises and illuminate a poetic path toward transformation, purpose, and belonging.
The short film, album, and book will be released 13 June 2025.
The long-gestating project takes its title from the term for a group of young male horses kept together in an enclosure. It began during the pandemic. “I spent much of my time during lockdown digging into my archives, reflecting on work from years earlier, while also quietly confronting middle age,” kurtis recalls.
While the poems are at least twenty years old, with one dating back as far as 1998, the project itself came together over several years beginning with the 2021 manuscript. The music was composed from 2021-23. The video footage was shot in 2021 and edited in 2023. In 2023, the artist used a series of AI tools to generate the book’s imagery, using one of the artist’s original drawings as a starting point. In 2024, he made the surround sound mix to complete the film.
“It’s one of those things that evolved slowly over time, but the vision was there from the beginning,” says the artist. “I knew from the moment I put together the manuscript that it was in service of something greater than nine quirky poems. It’s a good feeling when something like that happens, like you’re just a vessel, channeling an energy from somewhere else.”
Beyond how the project came together, readers should not look to kurtis for an explanation of the surreal and absurd poems. “There’s power in abstraction,” he says. “I’m not even sure I know what most of it means. But I know it’s interesting.”
The artist isn’t afraid to acknowledge he created a harras in a time of personal existential crisis, though. “Midlife is hard for everyone, and it’s hard to put words to it,” he says. “But it’s important to try—and a harras is one way I did that.”
“It was interesting to revisit things I wrote when I was young, inexperienced, and naïve, and find new purpose for them in a very different context, do something with them I couldn’t have done back then. It’s almost like collaborating with a different person. But also, I’m told I’m an old soul, so I like to think these poems were my younger self already aware of challenges I would face in the future. In that way, I wrote them for my future self because I knew I would need them one day. That’s the psychic element, my younger self reaching through time, looking out for my older self.”
Which begs the question: what is the artist putting away now, only to excavate twenty years from today? And how will an elderly kurtis look back on midlife? “I just hope I’m still making new things when I get there,” he says.
a harras is available 13 June 2025. Listen to the album wherever you stream music, watch the video on YouTube, and buy the book from bd-studios.com or your favorite bookseller.
luke kurtis is an artist exploring the intersection of visuals, text, and tech. a harras is kurtis’s third spoken word album and sixth album overall. The short film follows his previous spoken word video piece, seaside magic, and numerous other short video works.
bd is the art and publishing studio by luke kurtis. The a harras book is the first entry in our new little books collection.
a harras by luke kurtis
Book ISBN 978-1-950231-01-0
Paperback, 50 pages, 6 x 4 inches, $13
eBook also available
Album UPC 198595399576
Short film available on YouTube, with surround sound where available
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