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: “rivers of blood pulsed
tympanies,” 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. 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.
Romans 6:13 (“present your members as instruments of
righteousness”)— a Pauline metaphysics of sanctification through full bodily
submission—conative and autonomic structures as well as theoretical attention
of epistemology--to accountability and repair.
The Augustinian corrective to aesthetic paradigms is
contrasted to both Aristotelian mimesis and Kantian disinterest --not what you
perceive first, but what you love and are accountable to first. This
resequencing strips “enchantment” of its phenomenological nostalgia of mythic
magic and re-centers Christology in moral participation and telic fidelity. Not
Taylor’s perceptual wonder nor Balthasar’s attendance to historically halted
and halting forms as revealed glory as but removed glory by relational justice unfulfilled
and eclipsed by unaccountable individuality. The incarnational ethic transformed
by modern subjectivity and ironization (Daniel 2; Revelation 18).
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.
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. The disappearance of a sense of the transcendent in modern life is
not the loss of “enchantment,” but the loss of Christological virtues, most
primarily that of accountability to justice.
I. Five Modes of Difficulty and How to Approach Them
1. Verbal Innovation and Neologism
Olds repurposes language to capture metaphysical and
affective realities that resist inherited categories. Words like "conative
grace," "analogia entrance," or summoning "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. 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 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?
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).
FEATHERS LEFT FLOATING AT THE COLLAPSE: Twenty Recent Poems, following this anthology, "The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks"
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