Press Kit and Reader's
Guide (for potential reviewers and curatorial readership)
Title: The
Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks: A Sensorium of Brokenness and
Delight
Douglas B. Olds
The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks:
A Sensorium of Brokenness and Delight
Resource Publications, An Imprint of Wipf and Stock
ISBN 13: 979-8-3852-5418-7
Softcover $31
Pub. Date: 7/31/2025
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9798385254194
Hardcover Retail: $51
The
Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks: A Sensorium of Brokenness and
Delight is a book of poetry as metaphysical
field guide for a broken and spiritually empty world stuck between rejected
pieties and technocratic acceleration. It’s dense, prophetic, and lyrical—full
of pain, grace, and broken clarity. This isn’t feel-good verse; it’s poetry as
sacramentalized resistance, trying by language and directedness to heal what
technology, politicized history, and shallow and machined thinking have burned
out of us. A post-secular language that remembers the soul and dances with Christ-on-Earth
while discerning collapse on the margins and the responsibilities that follow.
Back
Cover:
The Inexhaustible Always
in the Exhausted Speaks is a collection of
Christological poetics vectored through interrogations of a post-secular age
scorched by technocratic acceleration, severing politics, and metaphysical
fatigue. Douglas Olds offers a restorative gathering of spiritual verse and shock—a
sacramental insurgency of language rooted in the Logos and driven by
kinesthetic conation. Here, poiesis is no aesthetic ornament—it is liturgical
rupture toward humanistic essence: Pentecostal breath meeting ecological
lament, covenantal fidelity rising through dissonance from false ideas
regarding nature.
Olds confronts categorical
abstraction and linear rationality, resisting epistemic closure and systematic
containment. With barometric acuity, he challenges the technocratic unmaking of
sacred time.
Through syntax both
serrated and serene, Olds offers not merely theological verse, but a poetics of
anthropological repair and its attendant pain and surprise—reorienting the
reader toward immanence, the incompleteness of eternity, and healing. A field guide—an
aperture—through cultural and environmental collapse, this work resituates
holiness as lived relationality within a fragmented world never forsaken by
creation.
Reading this anthology is
not merely reflection but recollected covenant—auscultating the heart’s beat of
waxing grace and embracing immanence where healing and eternity are shaped.
This is poetry that confidently sings where the Spirit still dances.
Why This Book Matters
1. Poetics for a Post-Truth Era
The work confronts the metaphysical void left by technocracy and artificial intelligence—not with nostalgia, but with a prophetic theology of reorientation grounded in covenant, embodiment, and sacred attentiveness.
2. A Replacement Liturgy for Seated Impressionism by the Poiesis of Initiation and Expressionism of Rupture and Repair
Drawing on traditions of lament, Pentecostal utterance, and Hebraic embodiment, these poems redefine beauty and faithfulness not as aesthetic calm but as relational fidelity and moral proprioception. Eschewing sentiment and system alike, the poems enact Pentecostal dislocation, mythopoeic embodiment, and liturgical dissonance. The result is a redefinition of poetic theology as initiation and constructive expression rather than mere reflection and theory of interiority that sits, watches, and waits.
3. A New Mode of Theological Lyricism
For readers of Four Quartets, My Bright Abyss, or The Wild Iris, this is a work that dares to make spiritual language difficult again—not to obscure, but to dignify and support the reader’s struggle toward clarity, healing, and responsibility.
Genre: Poetic Theology / Post-Secular Metaphysical
Poiesis
Form: Lyric-prophetic iconoclasm with
prose-theological coda
Length: Multi-part structure + "Afterward
(Postlude as Prologue)"
Intended Audience:
- Readers of
theological and philosophical poetry
- Scholars of
post-secular literature, poetics, or political theology
- Artists and
ethicists engaged in ecological or metaphysical renewal
- Seekers of
poetic language rooted in commitment, not performance
Overview:
In the era of accelerationist spectacle, where the human soul
has been outsourced to circuitry and sensation recoded as performative screen
rather than welcoming tent to how and where care is needed, there remains beneath
ecological and historical collapse of meaning and trust a rhythm of covenantal
discernment: embodied, poetic, and accountable: A liturgy of rupture, recovery,
and resistance indicts both the metaphysical evacuation by modernity and its replacement
by simulated certainties of AI-era technoculture.
The Pentecostal poetics of Iconoclasm and Renewal are updated
enthusiasm of “tongues,” not to obscure or perform, but to erode linguistic
habits and rearrange possibilities of perception. Neologistic, anatomical, and
intertextual intrusions make the sonic architecture of grace sing through a
bumpy ride in the broken world’s sensorium. Where language is difficult because
the worlds--both interior and exterior--it expresses are spiraling toward collapse,
and the world’s repair requires a muscle of gracious Shemaic power that does not
follow linear time. The metaphors are anatomical, ecological, and mythopoeic
because abstractions in linear logic have failed. Where rhyming and rhythm
appear not as ornaments of favored stasis but as remnants toward cosmic re-ordering
of power.
Spiritual language, to be salvific and healing, must again
become kinesthetic, conative, and covenantal. But it must pass through rupture:
de-formalizing human systems and conceited ends in transcendental guise.
At stake is the restoration of attentiveness. Attention
here is not digital capture or epistemic sorting, but the ethical posture of a
heart listening for what justice rolls through: “tympanic rivers of blood pulsed and braided through error,” not irony’s soporific drift.
The movement of these poems can be traced inside a
prophetic arc:
·
From diagnostic ferocity to
lyrical meditation of where proprioceptive grief and ecological ache become the
seedbed of metaphysical reawakening,
• To the
eschatological clarity of patching time to hope through heart-felt and
intent-centered conative metaphysics.
This is a Pentecostal modernism, neither repeating form nor
evacuating metaphysical meaning, but coalescing utterance, rhythm, and
proprioception into a theology of resistance. Poetry not to be decoded but to
be walked with, slowly.
Reading the
Inexhaustible:
A Guide to
Poetic-Theological Difficulty
For readers of The Inexhaustible Always in the
Exhausted Speaks: A Sensorium of Brokenness and Delight
Follows a way to deliberate the difficulty in Douglas B. Olds's
poetic-theological collection, not to decode it reductively, but to frame its
resistance to immediate clarity as a theological and poetic virtue,
a validity derived
from nether voyages like those of Orpheus, Persephone, Dante’s Virgil, Wagner’s
Tannhäuser, and Heidegger’s Hölderlin
but sprung outward by unbound embodiment
testified first by linguistic rupture and only after, of eros.
Inaccessibility
of theme and language here is a summons to a deeper form of reading:
covenantal, participatory, and spiritually embodied.
Olds writes to
recalibrate our metaphysical attention and covenantal perception. He offers an apocalyptic dismantling of aesthetic theory. He writes from the position that postmodern horizontality is a failure of covenantal emplacement, not a liberation from metaphysical hierarchy. He does not abandon modernism, but recovers its roots in iconoclasm of form, rejection of hierarchy, AND the eruptions of recovered accountabilities. He asks:
What if art were not a claim to genius but to judgment?
Not expression that tweely and effetely passes to survive, but exorcism that reorients
toward repentance and repair? A kinesthetic rendering of teleological readiness standing against both Romantic individualism and institutionalized notions of theological beauty.
This essay argues that art has, positively or
negatively, a Christo-soteriological mission: not as expression of a personal
claim of genius, but as exorcism--a kenotic act of the mature soul—“finished”
not in perfection, but in teleological readiness—undoing inherited cultural
violences from original sin coded into perception. Where immanence is
Christologically indexed, not in spatial remoteness or vectors of hierarchy but
in ethical nearness that serves(cf. Micah 6:8).
Modern humans are caught between eschatological
timeframes—a precarious lean-to of traditional norms and
explosive contradictions. Midmodernity is not just disoriented, but rupturing
with either a Pentecostal or ashen/sludge sediment. Postmodern horizontality of
meaning, devoid of accountability to covenantal emplacement for securing a Christo-telic,
Providential topology is a Flatland’s spatialized modernism (Kantian schemata
applied to neighborhood) severed from embodied covenantal constraints to act as
the earth’s trustee.
Midmodernity’s flatland ignorance launched by
ballooning abstract space is a bombarded foxhole of existence at the
intersection of colliding repudiations. Techno-abstraction is already popping into
smithereens, the other-- covenantal, embodied community--will take a generation
to repair along lines other than the old dogmatic pieties. This is not Paradox
which would merely expose the loss of depth; it is Rupture that demands an acknoweledged
emplacement for repairing Logos. The repair is not through utopian acceleration nor
reversing the “loss of wonder,” but through slow ecclesial re-forming of soul
and community that has lost accountabilty –where the defeat of evil dispenses with
the necessity to fund a Bildung based on paradox and suffering; rather to live
in the light of discipleship, where shadow only exists in the past and as a
foil for parody.
Excursus: Poiesis as Structured Drift or Kinesthetic Pivot?
To frame the linguistic difficulty of poietic repair, consider the following dialectic of cultural ennui and irony alongside historical drift with the
alternative literary approach of eschatological pivot:
Early one morning words were
missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story,
Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three
old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said.
Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about
the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called
"audacity," which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out
everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually,
without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid
boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work
enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede
the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
--Anne Carson's
"Introduction" to "Short Talks",
Postured
Knowledge as Mystery and Poetic Irony
“What use is it to question us? they said.”
“…the plant called ‘audacity,’ which poets mistake for violets.”
This tonal mode gestures toward metaphorical plurality divorced from metaphysical truth: self-cancelling irony leads aesthetic
quietists to dodge the position of challenging and changing kineaesthetic perception. The
questioning of the crones is both posed and dismissed, while the poet is gently
mocked for confusing audacity with beauty, a metaphoric reduction as might
seem evasive—a gesture that retreats from poetic accountability into a
framed artwork of rejection’s poise. Irony becomes a mask for humbling metaphysical
irresponsibility when it reduces existential struggle and anthropologies of poiesis
into literary play.
“The marks construct an instant of nature gradually,
without the boredom of a story.”
“I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.”
Anti-Aristotelian poetics metaphysically presumes
discontinuity as a more authentic register of reality--anti-narrative poetics cupped by formal delay (e.g. in Rosenzweig and Benjamin) as aesthetic
tactics.
Instead of seeking to rupture stasis (e.g., as in Celan, Franz Wright, or late Hill ) and the shallow narratives of ethical
accommodation, theo-poetic repair negates through parody and syntactic jag solipsistic
forms of play and concealment. An assertion that boredom--not eschatological ignorance
or egological aggrandizing--is the great enemy is the rooting tap of secular
aestheticism, an abdication of moral or metaphysical stakes.
Instead, the torqued, blue doppler shifting narratives of metanoia
(Erzahlen of Empfinden) set against the red chutes of mise-en-scène, phenomena
of historical event piercing stone and temple, where boredom is not a
threat, but sleepwalking that sustains the absence it names, and at worst the
zombie evasion of accountability to attend more deeply, not more quickly.
“You can never use the infinitives and participles
oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough…”
Style is not an Ethical Form, nor speed a prima facie deepening of resistance
Aestheticization of grammar (odd use of infinitives,
harsh impediments) without ethical priority (Hebrews 5: 13-14) may expose experimental
techniques of personal privilege, but the key difference is telic vision and vector:
neologism, disjunction, and breakage of formalism in service of covenantal
rupture, spiritual wakefulness, and kinesthetic realization for missions of repair
by the linguistic trust as the divine imagination. Difficult “style” means jibing a huge brigantine toward
the eschaton’s horizon: tuning sheet and rudder to poietic recall and service
that Re-member the essence of the trustee, of the divine imager, to bridge
eternity with generation. Of archive with pedagogy.
Without recovery of telos, stylized expression becomes
ethically vacuous favoring syntax over metaphysical structure. Carson’s text stylizes fragmentation by implicit or esoteric
yearnings without robust telic witness. Where she drifts by irony to forestall
closure, poiesis ruptures entropies as covenantal opening and enlightening.
Prophetic eschatology with poietic praxis, operating
by metaphysical torque that sequences cadence between rupture and lyric, tenses
against secular and poetic sensibilities cored and coring by ironic remove. Carson’s
mythopoeic minimalism gestures toward metaphysical loss rather than
metaphysical repair through covenantal poiesis and ethical grammar. Like those
of other minimalist ironizers, her text flirts with gnostic absence and paints
entropy with the brush of aesthetic irony that detaches, while poiesis mandates
rupture from the static and reducing heart toward telic realignment and
activity—the apo-cata-stasis: what flows FROM the RESISTANCE to static FORM
even when linearly occasioned.
An ethics of unboredom is at best fragmentariness hosting
ennui and melancholy as an ethos of elegy and loss—not simply refusal. In
contrast, metaphysics as articulated through Shema-Christological conation and
poetic proprioception regards language as inherently covenantal—not absenting,
not epiphenomenal, but a medium of divine and ethical responsiveness. No
metaphysical grounding beyond form and churning content in historical place:
indeed, save increasing velocity-- Aristotelian
momentum as style, condensation without transformative torque that throws a wrench into laissez-faire, proprioceptive torque the vector of life as poietic, where linear velocity dissolves into the vice of haste--an arrow of stasis where the eschaton of accountability is neither recognized
nor aligned.
Carson’s text is conscious of its aesthetic cleverness
and mythic gestures, its critique of narrative as proxy for linearity. It elides
and masks the accountability of address—both centrifugal and centripetal—objective
and subjective. From its cues, her text suggests suspending the heart where it
should blast. It decorates false ethos where it should bear witness. It fears
boredom more than it embraces truth. In the end, it is too embedded in recurrent
tropes to burst from games that burrow, to bring the pistil of wisdom.
Poetry affixes a regenerating purpose to description. Poiesis deepens and expands outward from there to announce, backward and forward, the cold eschaton: Double-edged (s)words (Rev. 19:15), the one justice piercing soul and sinew, diagnostic of the heart’s failures (Hebrews 4:12), and the other grace, guiding, flaming, lambent edge lofted and torqued by a lighthouse flipped wristed Genesis 3:24), a shoulder compel and urge, embodied guide to throw nets to the far side (John 21:6), a danced entrance across the Read-Dead sea (Exod. 15:20-21). Moses spreading his hands, staved staffs. All motions leading toward the tree of life.
Such eschatological poiesis both difficult to write and difficult to apprehend. It is meant not only diagnose what fails covenantal perception, but to resurrect it going forward. For those on the late side of the death-life struggle, this seems as paradox at best, while those erupting toward meek inheritance, it may seem as song dancing to new sinews of rhythm and motors of meaning. The language of this collection is double edged, the reader is historically placed on a continuum, contingent by context of language and experience.Thus slow and repeated reading of poiesis may bring new focus and new angles to what is erupting: the eschaton through the dead age impasse of rejected performative pieties (Acts 7) and technocratic acceleration in necromantic neuromancy.
Poiesis refuses form as healing, paradox and irony as postures, and instead invites the reader into considering discipleship-as-rupture and tending towards building after sludge-systeming collapse. Poiesis begins where paradox fails. In the rubble of flattened symbols and disrupted perception, the ethical soul does not observe—it builds. This is no longer the age of attending to form. It is the age of the repairing Logos by sanctified muscle and recollection of what worked and what went off the rails of the human essence. Where drama of interiority may have tested the imprintlessness of Spirit and the futility of character of training, now is the time to flow from impression of moment to expression of what is coming through eternity--from "substantia" to Trinitarian ousia flowing by grace from the heart.
Art is the effort of the finished ethical soul to
present truth in a way that ruptures the accretion of sin and error. I.e. to
complete the divine within by taming all kinesthesis thrilling to violence and
vengeance (1 Cor 15:28). The disappearance of a sense of the transcendent in modern life is
not through a loss of “enchantment,” but the loss of Christological virtues, most
primarily that of accountability to justice.
III. Some Recurring Concepts and Modes
- Conative Grace: The movement
of the heart toward relational fulfillment; action grounded in covenant
rather than cognition.
- Poiesis: Making by
repairing what is sacred, ethical, and world-restoring.
- Sensorium: The whole
perceptive apparatus—spiritual, emotional, cognitive, bodily—by which
reality is encountered, newly “thrown” into eternity.
- Post-Secular: Neither
secular (worldly pragmatics devoid of metaphysical clarity) nor traditionally religious; a space of metaphysical return to the
heart amid cultural exhaustion with logicians and “mind-fluencers.” The
metaphysical and metaphoric resolving of the current mid-modern space
caught between rejected pieties and accelerating attempts at technocratic
hijack.
- Shema-Christological: A salvific,
earth-placed sequence of anthropology grounded in the Hebrew Shema (Deut.
6:4–5), fulfilled (Matt. 22:37) in Christ’s command to love with heart,
soul, strength, and mind. Where ethics establishes the inner and outer domain of imaging aesthetics (Hebrews 5:13-14).
- Hetero-glossolalia: Spirit-led
utterance; the poetic mode of enthusiasm and satire that emerges when
language ruptures from political despair and cultural burials into the
daybreak of grace.
- Tenting: The
poietic labor of carrying sacred history through trauma and re-birth; an
embodied sheltering of nomadic memory and testimony into grace, the future
coming by new generational genius.
This book does not yield itself easily because it is not a
product—it is a witness to darkness overcome, through by as yet unrecognized
lights of iconoclasm. Its poems are fragments of the eternal spoken in the
ruins of the now. To read it is not only or readily to understand, but to be
summoned by the heart's internal ear to express new words, to work new powers, and walk by Christ's sensorium in the habituation of repairing.
Resist the temptation to interpret too quickly. Allow
yourself to be broken open into it.
The inexhaustible always speaks—but only the exhausted
aware can hear (Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 6:8).
--
TEATHERS LEFT FLOATING AT THE COLLAPSE: Thirty Recent Poems, following this anthology, "The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks"
