Poetae Vulnerati Lucivernae is a literary historical novel set in Renaissance Italy, where silence is inherited like blood and memory is carried not only by people, but by land, ritual, and women whose names history forgets.
In the imagined hill town of Luniverna, generations are bound by secrecy, exile, and unspoken love. Beneath the rhythms of feast days, family duty, and Catholic ritual, old wounds persist ? betrayals buried, children unacknowledged, desires forbidden, and grief disciplined into obedience. What cannot be spoken survives instead in gesture, song, thread, and fire.
At its heart, the novel traces fractured lineages and the quiet acts that attempt repair. Fathers burdened by authority and silence, mothers bearing loss in private, daughters and lovers discovering one another across boundaries of class, faith, and expectation. As time unfolds, concealment gives way to moments of recognition, forgiveness, and grace ? sometimes too late to change outcomes, yet never without consequence.
Written in lyrical, symbol-rich prose, the novel unfolds through recurrence rather than spectacle. Motifs of fig trees, flame, cloth, bread, ink, and eclipse form a private language beneath the narrative, guiding the reader through memory, rupture, and healing. History is not a backdrop but a living pressure, shaping every choice through patriarchy, devotion, and exile.
Though a companion to the memoir The Kintsugi Poet, this novel stands entirely on its own. It is not autobiography, but a fable born from blood memory ? from the place before language, where ancestry, grief, and love take mythic form when they cannot be told plainly.
Poetae Vulnerati Lucivernae is a novel of quiet intensity: a meditation on lineage, silence, and the ways broken histories may still be held ? if never fully healed ? with reverence.
