The silence before the strike is five miles wide.
It holds the whole valley in its mouth.
Songs for what didn't break clean.
“A masterpiece does not protect you from the stairs.”
“The day kept nothing but the standing.”
“We spend years trying to remove the scar before we discover it has been holding the house together.”
ABOUT
Silas Votivus writes under a name that isn't his own. Not a mask — a choice, made the way you choose which door to walk through when both lead to the same room.
By day he rebuilds what's broken, piece by piece, joint by joint. By night he writes about the breaks that don't set so easily.
He has lived enough places, in enough languages, that meaning stopped staying inside words. It moved into weather. Into salt, zinc, fog, the cold that gets into hemp and doesn't leave. He learned to read a country the way he reads a wound — for what's structural, for what's still healing, for what will never fully close and has to be built around instead.
Geometry of the Scar is his debut collection, published under his own imprint, Votivus Press. Four movements. Forty-eight fractures. One structure, still standing.
The damage is structural.
The repair is structural.
So is the song.
THE COLLECTIONS
Geometry of the Scar
A sequence about damage and the machinery of repair, in four movements.
A masterpiece does not protect you from the stairs.
Early Readers
01
Be the first to hear it, before anyone else does.
An early copy means reading these poems before they exist anywhere else — before a cover shows up in a bookstore, before a stranger's review shapes how you go in. You'll be sitting with the raw architecture of the book: the fever, the salt, the shrapnel, the loom, in the order they were meant to be found, with nothing standing between you and the page but the author's intention. There's a particular kind of attention that only comes from reading something before the world has told you what to think of it — and that's what this is an invitation to.
02
Your voice helps a small press find its readers.
Silas Votivus is published through Votivus Press — a small, independent imprint with no marketing department, no algorithm, and no ad budget behind it. What it has instead is readers willing to say something honest, in public, when the book releases: a review on Amazon, a note on Goodreads, a few sentences that tell the next reader what they're about to walk into. That's not a small ask disguised as a favor — it's the actual mechanism by which independent work reaches people who'd want it, and every review from someone who read the book carefully is worth more than anything paid advertising could buy.
03
A quieter kind of exchange than most "advance copy" programs offer.
This isn't a mailing list you'll get lost in, or a program with tiers and perks and fine print. It's small on purpose: a limited number of readers, a real book in your hands (or inbox) before its release date, and a simple, honest ask in return — read it, and if it moved you, say so somewhere public. If you've ever wanted to be part of how a book finds its footing in the world, rather than just picking it up after the fact, this is that chance.
Contact
Reach out about the work, the books, or anything else
New work, rare notes, and occasional dispatches from wherever the road ends. No frequency promises.