International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards (What Light Was), novelist Shawn Callaway Hays delivers Calling to Atom in Secret Love of Strange Affinity. Hays undertakes an epic of metaphysical ambition and spiritual intensity—a mythopoetic work in seven books that fuses sacred scripture with postmodern cosmology, religious philosophy with poetic existentialism. Through a consciously structured reworking of the Pentateuchal arc—Genesis through Deuteronomy, culminating in Recapitulation—Hays constructs nothing less than a theopoetic a new “Book of Beginnings” for the post-atomic soul. Hays’s project is a literary, spiritual, and philosophical event. It is not only a poetic reimagining of the origin and destiny of humanity, but a systematic inquiry into the metaphysical problem of how consciousness, language, and divine presence can emerge from—and participate in—the inertial matter of a fallen cosmos. Taking Oscar Wilde’s line from The Picture of Dorian Gray as both epigraph and philosophical provocation—“atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity”—Hays builds a poetics of resonance, wherein thought, matter, and spirit vibrate in intersubjective affinity. The poem employs a syncretic intertextuality that spans from John Milton to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Walt Whitman to Dante Alighieri, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Oscar Wilde, aligning itself with the high traditions of theological verse while pushing into the ontological spaces charted by modern physics and philosophical theology. Echoes of Teilhard de Chardin, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and Paul Tillich hover in the intellectual atmosphere of the text, yet Hays remains fiercely original in execution. The prophet-poet is neither mere theologian nor mystic, but a dramatist of metaphysical vulnerability—one who sees history and matter themselves as texts, waiting to be interpreted, rewritten, and re-enchanted. The form of the poem is an invocation of the sacred is not simply origin, but repetition. “Recapitulation” is Hays’s theological cornerstone—a patristic term reinvigorated into literary structure. Here, the divine does not impose, but re-members, reformulates, and resurrects. Each metaphor—blood, atom, voice, covenant, breath—is rendered as both symbol and sacrament, charged with semiotic and metaphysical power. In an era defined by disaffection, scientific abstraction, and spiritual longing, Calling to Atom in Secret Love of Strange Affinity offers a unique, rigorous, and luminous response. It is not simply a poem—it is a meta-scripture, a cosmological theology composed in verse, and an invitation to believe again in the mystery of being, through the power of poetic speech. For scholars of religion, readers of speculative theology, and lovers of literary epic, this book stands at the merged heights of poetic imagination, metaphysical inquiry, and sacred aspiration. It is a hymn for those who pray with questions, who think with yearning, and who hope that even atoms, too, might recognize their Beloved.
