Poetry and prose became the way I could name the hurt, the mattering, the things I was too scared to say out loud. I don't write to observe from a distance. I write to intervene—in the silence we're taught to keep, in the isolation that makes survival feel like a language no one else speaks.
Phase I: The Excavation ( Until Silence Spoke )
Finding authentic voice, creating maps from scar tissue, and treating silence as preparation, not emptiness.
Phase II: The Architecture ( After the Last Echo )
Stewarding voice, constructing conscious relationships, and exploring the mathematics of repair over performance.
Phase III: The Intervention ( Waiting for Room )
Expanding beyond the self to use poetry as collective service and embracing the radical discipline of hope.
Phase IV: The Witness ( American Witness )
A confrontation with Lady Liberty, using Echo-mapping methodology (repetition as sonar) to transform readers into co-witnesses of America's collective trauma. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
Phase V: The Convergence ( Between Breath and Release )
The narrative centers on Ezra, who dies at 24 saving a stranger—hours after learning he was adopted. Set in purgatory, Ezra witnesses two people, Thomas and Grace, rebuilding their love after dying together in a robbery gone wrong. And that's where the real story begins—where witness becomes inheritance, and love becomes matter. 24 poems across 12 dual forms explore love as instruction.
SONNETS = containment after chaos
VILLANELLES = trauma that loops
BALLADS = stories that must be told
BLANK VERSE = dramatic dialogue
PROSE POEMS = confession too big for lines
ELEGIES = sacred pace for touching wounds
HAIKU = dailiness of love
ODES = praising the dying
EPIC = love as heroic tragedy
FREE VERSE = revelation without container
CONCRETE = bodies made visual
CARTOGRAPHY OF VOICE ( The Complete Series )
[ HARDBACK ]
6 x 9 inches
254 pages
ISBN: 979-8-3496-4737-6
$45 USD + SHIPPING
CARTOGRAPHY OF VOICE ( The Complete Series )
[ PAPERBACK ]
6 x 9 inches
254 pages
ISBN: 979-8-2188-7289-2
$35 USD + SHIPPING
Completed in a single year of urgent, relentless creation, Cartography of Voice charts the journey from individual grief to collective testimony—a blueprint for finding the voice that was always waiting. The work is structured in five phases, with a sixth phase, Memory, conceived as a future return after the necessary distance of time.
When designer and writer Rick Maderis's mother died in January 2025, the brush went quiet. He returned to what remained: old poetry journals, college fragments, pieces written in periods of silence between composition books and yellow legal pads. From this excavation—fusing past material with immediate grief—he built a five-phase curriculum for securing voice after loss. This is not a book for passive reading. It is sound made visible, structure made necessary. Maderis weaves verse, memoir, manifesto, and formal analysis into a work that operates as both autobiography and map.
EXCERPT FROM CARTOGRAPHY OF VOICE
This isn't a book of poems. It's an archive of echoes—the sound you make when silence finally breaks and you realize survival was never about staying quiet. It was about learning what your voice could hold. This is a manual for integrity. A blueprint for speaking when it hurts. A map made from necessity first, then offered as company. If you've survived something and don't know how to talk about it yet, start here. Not as answers—as company. The kind that says: I've been here. You're not alone.
This work asks two questions: Where do I find my voice? and What do I build with it?
Everything that follows is my answer.