Press Kit and Reader's Guide (for potential reviewers and curatorial readership)
THE INEXHAUSTIBLE ALWAYS IN THE EXHAUSTED SPEAKS:A Sensorium of Brokenness and Delight
Douglas B. Olds
Resource Publications ∕ Wipf & Stock • July 31 2025
| 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
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Hybrid Form: lyric+prophetic + prose-theological coda.
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Pedagogical Ready: built-in glossary and “Five Modes of Difficulty” guide.
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Timely Themes: AI ethics, ecological grief, post-secular theology.
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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
Ideal Venues & Courses
Modern Theology • Eco-poetics • Religion & Literature • Political Theology
Contact / Review Copies
Douglas Olds • douglasolds@outlook.com (Amazon author page with bio)
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.
Overview:
In the era of accelerationist spectacle, where the human soul has been outsourced to circuitry and sensation recoded as performative screen rather than an aperture and 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 may 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.
I. 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?
III. 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).
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