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
| ISBN 13 | 979-8-3852-5418-7 (paper) / 979-8-3852-5419-4 (cloth) |
| Price | $31 paper • $51 cloth |
| Specs | 300 pp • 6 × 9 • Poetry / Theology |
“Dense, prophetic, and lyrical—a sacramental insurgency of language that refuses technocratic nihilism.” —(back-cover)
Why Curators Should Care
Hybrid Form: lyric+prophetic + prose-theological coda.
Pedagogical Ready: built-in glossary and “Five Modes of Difficulty” guide.
Timely Themes: AI ethics, ecological grief, post-secular theology.
Length: Multi-part structure + "Afterward (Postlude as Prologue)"
Blurbs secured from back cover: (see full kit).
Genre: Poetic Theology / Post-Secular Metaphysical Poiesis:
- Poetry / Philosophy / Theology
Spiritual Poetics / Ecological Theology
Hybrid Poetics / Metaphysical Literature
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 of interiorities
Ideal Venues & Courses
Re-Modernizing Theology • Eco-poetics • Political and Poietic Theology
Contact / Review Copies
Douglas Olds • douglasolds@outlook.com (Amazon author page with bio)
Note For Secular Reviewers:
While deeply rooted in Christian theology, this work does not assume confessional belief. Its theological language functions as ethical grammar rather than doctrinal enforcement, addressing questions of responsibility, embodiment, and technological mediation that concern readers across secular and religious contexts.
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.
Difficulty is not opacity for its own sake. It is the necessary cost of descent that gives poetry its "validity": the nether-voyages of Orpheus, of Persephone’s seasonal underworld of Greek archetypes of recurrence, of Virgil guiding Dante through the Romanesque strata of treasoning hell, of Wagner’s Tannhäuser caught between the erotic and the sacred, or of the Teutonic lost riverbanks of Hölderlin’s occasioned by Heidegger’s metaphysical sundown. And more precisely still, it is the storm and strain of Herder—Olds’s genealogical guide to the idealist Enlightment—pressing against the closures of abstraction and into the thick and mist-ruptured realm of the de-metaphysicals, from which the world must be reclaimed. To spring a new season outward by unbound embodiment, testified first by linguistic rupture and only after the settlements and virtues of beauty.
Relative inaccessibility of theme and language here is a summons to a deeper form of reading.
I. Difficulties of the Strange:
A strangeness lies in moral address reintroduced where contemporary poetry has evacuated responsibility, coupled with lexical invention that refuses metaphor-only containment.These produces unease because the reader is never allowed to remain a spectator. The poems appear to be speaking at us rather than for us, which is rare and disorienting.”
Neologisms and compound formations are not playful or decorative. They function as ethical pressure devices. This is strange because:
contemporary poetry often treats neologism as texture;
here, neologism carries ontological accusation and fracture semantic comfort.
Words are restructured when existing vocabulary is judged complicit. This is rare outside prophetic traditions. This regrounds Pentecost not as babble but as indictment.
Strangeness of Tone: The anthology uses satire, but never retreats into satire’s safety:
Mockery appears, but it does not dissolve responsibility.
Grotesque imagery (bodily, scatological, technological) is used not for shock but for moral unmasking.
The poems refuse catharsis, ending in ethical exposure rather than lyrical closure.
This makes readers uneasy because:
irony is denied as an escape hatch,
aesthetic pleasure is subordinated to accountability.
Many will find tonal strangeness difficult but, in the best cases, even more so unforgettable.
Temporal Strangeness: Eschatology Without Countdown
This anthology becomes saturated with eschatological language, but it rejects both futurism and apocalypse-as-spectacle.
Time is treated as compressed, recursive, morally thick.
Biblical eschatology is invoked as present ethical pressure, not end-times prediction.
Collapse is not awaited; it is already operative.
This produces a strange temporal sensation:
the poems feel urgent without hysteria,
prophetic without fanaticism,
theological without system.
This temporal register is sustained across hundreds of pages.
Strangeness of Genre Integrity: the struggle to decide on which shelf this collection belongs:
The anthology refuses genre compliance:
poetry behaves like theology but will not systematize,
theology behaves like prophecy but does not yet soothe (that still to come),
satire behaves like lament but will not sentimentalize.
This genre refusal is itself strange in a literary ecosystem that rewards recognizable interiors.
Across the anthology, thematic strangeness intensifies in:
Sequences dealing with AI / simulation / technocracy
– because they fuse theological language with contemporary systems critique without metaphorizing either.Poems invoking biblical figures without allegory
– Jonah, Ezekiel, David, Christic imagery appear as ethical contemporaries, not symbols.This appended Ars Poetica
– because it openly declares poetic conation in an age that treats intent as naïve or authoritarian.
Most poets try to hide their metaphysics; this anthology argues it can do nothing else. It
Is too confrontational for consensus building
Rejects neutrality in ways that limit institutional embrace or careerist roots
Demands theological literacy many readers lack
Yet serious readers will not find this strangeness trivial, derivative, or merely experimental.
Those who will receive this text rightly will not do so as consumers, but as fellow participants in poetic theurgy—co-stewards of language undergoing purification. Others may recoil in bafflement or accuse it of extremity, but this is anticipated and integrated into the very structure of the text.
Thus, poetry challenges not as a scroll of institutional priesthoods to be brandished, but as a call to be answered. It is pre-liturgics of trusteeship for anthropology cast for entrusted imaging and perfecting immanence.
This anthology is strange because it reintroduces judgment, covenant, and responsibility into contemporary poetry without irony, without apology, and without nostalgia.
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
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.”
Whereas Carson’s fragmentation wavers between parody and epistemic shrug, a sly elevation of the surveying ego stymied--Nietzsche’s difficulty is of another order: not the drift of disavowal but the curve of exclusion. His style erects barriers of entry, enshrining opacity as selectivity. “Every nobler spirit and taste selects his audience…”—so he writes, sharpening style into secrecy, not service: the rending of exclusive opacity as binding to binary esotericism:
On the question of being understandable. — One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be under-stood. It is by no means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it incomprehensible: perhaps that was part of the author's intention — he didn't want to be understood by just 'anybody'. Every nobler spirit and taste selects his audience when he wants to communicate; in selecting it, he simultaneously erects barriers against 'the others'. All subtler laws of a style originated therein: they simultaneously keep away, create a distance, forbid 'entrance', understanding, as said above — while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. [The Gay Science, §381]
Categories of friend and enemies are addressed strategically, esoterically bounded. Such reading underlies Leo Strauss's post-Schmittian refractory allusiveness--ethics subordinated to esoteric survival. Nietzsche’s stylistic boundary-making—his refusal to be “understood by just anybody”—replaces prophetic poiesis with a will-to-distinction that disdains shared discernment. His esotericism disjoins language from communal repair, treating opacity not as the necessary cost of mystery but as the privilege of rank. Poiesis, in this mode, no longer beckons the neighbor but selects the elect.
In the same way that poietic difficulty can revolt against linearity as traditional proxies for hierarchy (as in post-structuralism), it can also bury agendas in subterranean cryptics. It is to the reader to ask if poetic difficulty serves elitist, evasive, or ethical ends. The difficulty--strangeness--of eschatological torquing language is of a different sort than those posed by playfulness or occlusiveness of intent,. Covenanted intent is difficult to discern in secular history not trained in metaphysical claims except to deny and ignore them.
Aesthetic refusal—whether through Carson’s sly non-answers or Nietzsche’s selective gatekeeping—mirrors the metaphysical attenuation of poiesis when it is decoupled from covenant. In contrast, a conative theology of poiesis, rooted in the Shema, bears difficulty as relational burden, not exclusion. Language here is strained not to ward off the “unworthy,” but to make room for the neighbor’s restoration. Ethics, like in Hebrews 5: 13-14, is the ground of aesthetics and its repair, not vice versa.
II. 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 language 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 rupture its own recursive games, too busy burrowing to bring forth the pistil of wisdom. This is chicanery of high post-structural provenance, collapsing like Levi-Strauss's “sunset” philosophical error of aesthetic quietism and drowned ethics applied to the West. Post-structuralism need not be discarded as heuristics, but its ironic type that fiddles beside conflagration is mooted. Same with mythopoeic minimalism that lofts boredom like summer dust from toney urban boulevards. This is not difficulty as covenantal urgency, but ornament as apophasis. It refuses the burden of address while feigning the language of abyss. Like Nietzsche’s late prose—when irony hardened into stylized self-insulation—it turns pathos into posture, confession into curated opacity. The result is a poetics of metaphysical withdrawal: esotericism posing as insight, style shielding retreat.
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…”
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.
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 or fragmentation of “enchantment,” but the loss of Christological virtues and denial of metaphysics, most
primarily that of accountability to justice.
III. Five Modes of Difficult Readings and How to Approach Them
1. Linguistic Innovation and Neologism
Olds repurposes language to capture metaphysical and affective realities that resist inherited categories. Words like "conative grace," "analogia entrance," or "covenantal poiesis" may appear foreign, but they are not arbitrary. Neologism expresses an entry toward satire, with an exit that tears veils. Like paradox, they are invitations to meditate and escape, not just interpret and sit.
Practice: Walk with these words. Read them aloud let their rhythm function like echoes. What bodily resonance, as theologically placed in and sequenced by the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), Matthew 22:37, and Hebrews 5: 13-14 (in the book's epigraph) do they awaken?
2. Syntactic Disruption
Many lines twist, enjamb, or contradict typical grammatical flow. This reflects the internal disorientation of modern subjectivity, theological rupture, and the Pentecostal surge Olds invokes throughout.
Practice: Read passages multiple times. Scan for parallel structure, musical phrasing, or internal rhymes. What might seem broken is often orchestrated, where melody is a scaffold emerging from dissonance.
3. Allusion Without Footnote
References to Scripture, classical myth, patristics, political theology, and metaphysical philosophy are everywhere, yet rarely flagged. This challenges the reader not to master texts but to recognize and recollect and challenge the offshoots and tares of nostalgia.
Practice: Read as a kind of theological earthwork of now divorcing from dreams of heaven and whistles of homeland. Trace phrases and listen for echoes in literature as well as the Bible.
4. Structural Nonlinearity and Genre Hybridity
The book defies standard poetic architecture. Parts are lyric, others prophetic, lamenting, aphoristic, exegetical, (anti)liturgical. They function together never as a single argument but as a sensorium—a field magnetic, barometric--of unmapped, because individuated and alive, theological perception.
Practice: Let go of narrative expectations. Consider how light is both wave and particle, where it might shake cliche and shake out meaning. Read in clusters. Track motifs (grace, breath, flame, ark, sea, AI, witness) or genres. Cross-reference rhythms or symbolic recurrence from the standpoint of energies of the unfolding Spirit inside human accountable holiness.
5. Metaphysical Demands on the Reader
Olds does not perform for the reader with catharsis or tidy moral vignette. Instead, he intends that the reader change in awareness. Reading is framed as a moral act, a form of repentance, of being called to account in the life with God.
Practice: Approach the difficulties and seeming paradoxes of the text prayerfully or reverently of the hidden--even if not religious. Ask, what do these lines require of me? What modes of attention, of justice, of grace? What experience or work attempted is being reflected that might be part of my recollection?
IV. Some Recurring Concepts and Modes
- Conative Grace: The movement of the heart--intention--toward relational fulfillment; action grounded in covenant rather than cognition. Conation is volitional intentionality.
Poiesis: Making as social repair and ethical restoration—repairing what is sacred, wounded, and world-bearing. Language here does not merely signify; it orbits an ethical sun, not just an existential one—gravitating toward what heals, what binds, what makes whole. It gives leaf to an internal imaging and aesthetic of grace—planted in the Logos, rooting speech in covenant rather than form, in conation rather than display.
- Sensorium: The assembled organ of divine-human responsiveness tabernacled for testing human trusteeship of creation. The whole perceptive apparatus—spiritual, emotional, cognitive, bodily—by which reality is encountered, newly emergent and “thrown” into eternity.
- Post-Secular: Not a return to tradition, nor a drift into pragmatic secularism (thin accounts of worldliness), but a reawakening to thick metaphysics of the earth-planted heart of human trusteeship as telic renewal—where the exhausted heart turns from logics of control toward covenantal perception. It is a re-entry point: into mystery, into grace, into poetic repair—amid the collapse of both dogma and machine. The metaphysical and metaphoric restoration of accountability to the current mid-modern space caught between exhausted pieties and "inevitable" technocratic acceleration.
- Shema-Christological Existential Order: A salvific, earth-placed anthropology rooted in the Hebrew Shema (Deut. 6:4–5) extended and fulfilled in Christ’s command (Matt. 22:37) to love with heart, soul, strength, and mind. This order grounds human identity in relational intentionality rather than speculative cognition. It reorders metaphysics through ethical primacy, where moral discernment (cf. Heb. 5:13–14) forms the inner and outer domains of the human image and gives rise to a renewed, grace-aligned aesthetics. This is the covenantal sequence through which true imaging—Christopoiesis—is immanently rendered.
- Hetero-glossolalia: Spirit-led utterance that arises when language, ruptured by political despair and cultural burial (Ezekiel 3:22-27; Luke 1:20f), breaks forth into the iconoclastic re-dawning of grace. It is the poetic mode of enthusiasm and satire's disenthusiasm (contemning), where multiple voices—traditioned, living, divine—condense in eruptive harmony and disonance. Not babble, but a polyphonic cry of renewal, it testifies that when truth is suppressed, grace reanimates speech first through fracture, not by retrieval of form or system.
- 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).
FEATHERS LEFT FLOATING AT THE COLLAPSE: Thirty Recent Poems, following this anthology, "The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks"
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