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.

 

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

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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).