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Excerpt

Bricolage

My mom reconstructed our lives from junk.
Unbleached cardboard Orisha beaded masks,
glass-shard mosaics of proud Mary’s face,
a twisted crown of bottle caps and barbed wire,
found relics, littered our tar-paper house,
each objet d’art, a fetish, meant to stave
the shame of being poor. We ate, each night,
on painted plates of resurrecting suns.
She formed so much what others tossed away.
Now I scrounge through virtu and bric-a-brac,
the scattered trifles of remembrances,
to find her, traceless, gone. My soul sets bare.
Unfit to curate memory, I house
no rags, no cracked cups, no heart, fit for pawn.
© Richard Stimac

Praise for «Bricolage»

«To create order from chaos is what the poet achieves at his best. Defying the Third law of thermodynamics; who’s to say, that there’s no science to poetry? Same muted arrogance of seeking truths, absolutes, although deconstruction tells us truth does not exist? Stimac states – in a kind of Wildean preface, a one paragraph Manifesto-: that he views his «role» poetical, as a mosaicist -. Is this the call of all good poetry? The claim is well stated by this poet. Name, form, vision: it’s an absurd time that we live in. Any way to bring things closer helps…, indeed, only rendering all things with dear intimacy will sustain our compass. Mosaic, collage; it’s in the shimmer of collision & shift that beauty exists. Perhaps the mind of the poet is most suitable to the gathering & hunting, the Bedouin Hungry seeking to find that perfect stone? Chaos is what we are. Language is part of the mess we are, the part over which we have most control. As my friend Charles the anthropologist said «art is communication.»
-C Srygley-Moore, Termites Amidst the Milky Way (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2022)

«Richard Stimac’s beautiful Bricolage gathers objects lost, uncovered, unearthed, and remembered and, reencountering these relics, asks «for what good?» Why remember? Why revisit? Memory, Stimac says, «demands we act.» These poems are themselves acts in the vein of John Clare: observing, praising, and aching. Stimac has redeemed these lost wrecks, bottle shards, old dolls, and distinctively American landscapes with formal acuity, simultaneously precise and inventive. Bricolage is a delight.»
-Stephen Frech, Into Night’s Tent

Richard Stimac has woven together a collection of the tiniest treasures and moments of life- from a boy trying to make «stone walk on water » to yard sales where the bargains «make their value known.» These remembrances ring true for all of us. He asks us to reconcile an authentic life out of the shards of what has been left behind by the years. Stimac travels through the mysteries of a childhood faith, weaving in a history of time and place–the pieces of life for which we have no choice but to eventually confront.
-Diane Vogel Ferri, author of Everything is Rising

Bricolage reminds me of the different time and century we live and die in now, of the desuetude and tragic damage everywhere. We live in it and it lives within us. It’s a high technomass world that is totally unsupportable and is crumbling around us. What remains for us are the fragments of our past, the sociopathic dream of a metastatic parking lot world upon which the real infrastructure, our bio structure: the insects, worms, mice, birds and other mammals and microbes are poisoned, die and dry amidst junk cars stalled in huge parking structures or out somewhere in rows and stacks running off into the deepest topsoil in the world. Stimac has seen it all with an ophthalmologic eye and delicately transmutes this desolate and choking world into his work. His art is expressed so colorfully, full of kairic moments of satori and inspiration. His poems come up for us like mushrooms or fungi after a rain, between the cracks in the broken asphalt, next to a tiny daisy and a closed empty factory.
-Steven H. Bridgens, The Hobo Bob Cantos (OAC Press, 2022)

Paperback

Author Biography

Six generations of Richard’s family are buried or living within an hour of the Gateway Arch. Born and raised in the St. Louis area, Richard uses the landscape and history of the region to explore the relationship between memory and the present. He has one published book of poetry, another pending, and is working on multiple new projects. Currently, Richard works as a licensed massage therapist and Uber driver. His third job is writing. He has a daughter and a cat. Precedence depends on who you ask.