Geometry of the Scar

Some wounds don't heal. They calcify. They become load-bearing.

Geometry of the Scar is a book-length poem in four movements — The Fever, The Shrapnel, The Salt, The Loom — that charts the complete arc of interior collapse and reconstruction with the precision of an engineer and the rawness of an open fracture. Silas Votivus writes not about suffering in the abstract, but about its exact physics: the specific gravity of grief, the metallurgy of identity, the structural math of what breaks and what, against all odds, holds.

This is not a book about healing. It is a book about assembly — the hard, unglamorous work of weaving a self back together from debris, with no illusion that the finished garment will be beautiful, only that it will keep the wind out.

Moving through landscapes of fever and fuse, shrapnel and salt flat, frozen clock and rusted loom, Geometry of the Scar builds a singular, unforgettable architecture of language — where a bone reset in the dark grows back thicker at the fracture, where the scar is not hidden but amplified, where damage becomes the strongest point of the seam.

For readers of Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, and Anne Carson — and for anyone who has ever had to rebuild from the material of what nearly destroyed them.

We do not hide the damage. We weave the shard directly back into the seam.