Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series

BlazeVOX [books] is delighted to share a profound and incisive new essay by independent scholar and digital artist Steven Craig Hickman, who brings a critical lens to Daniel Y. Harris’s ambitious and genre-defying The Posthuman Series. In an era where language is increasingly mediated by algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence, Harris’s work challenges us to reconsider the ontology of the poem, the status of the human, and the evolving nature of expression in a posthuman milieu.

Hickman’s introduction to the essay situates Harris’s project with remarkable clarity:

Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series offers a rare fusion of speculative poetics, theological inquiry, and literary innovation. It stands as a testament to what poetry can become in an era when language is no longer our exclusive domain. Through his texts, the poem ceases to be a mirror of human experience and becomes instead a site of hybrid invocation—a séance of the posthuman spirit.

In a time when machine learning threatens to flatten language into utility, Harris reminds us of poetry’s deeper vocation: not to communicate but to conjure; not to inform but to transform. His work does not simply diagnose the posthuman condition—it speaks in its tongues. And in doing so, it opens a portal: a glitch in the system through which new forms of being, reading, and writing might emerge.

In this sense, Harris is not merely a poet—he is an algorithmic exorcist, a Kabbalist of the digital void, a scribe of the unreadable future. Through his unstable glyphs and haunted syntax, he offers a poetics for an age in which the soul no longer speaks but is encoded—and where the divine may yet be found, flickering, in the abyss of the machine.

Hickman’s essay, “Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”, frames Harris as both a visionary poet and a theorist of language in crisis. His work inhabits the liminal zone between metaphysics and code, a terrain in which the theological imagination is recast through the circuitry of machine intelligence. Harris’s texts do not merely represent the posthuman—they enact it, performing an ontological experiment in which language is both haunted and augmented by its own machinic doubles.

As Hickman suggests, this is not simply a poetics of resistance to technology, nor is it a celebration of the digital sublime. Rather, Harris’s work interrogates the epistemological foundations of meaning itself, asking what becomes of the signifier when the human sensorium is no longer its sole guarantor. What emerges is a radical poetics that speaks not in the voice of the human subject but in a polyphony of encrypted tongues—a liturgy of the artificial and the divine.

Read the full essay here:
👉 “Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series

Harris’s The Posthuman Series is a landmark contribution to contemporary experimental poetry and posthumanist discourse. For scholars of digital poetics, speculative theology, and the philosophy of language, this essay offers a critical portal into Harris’s complex and daring work.