by Richard Stimac (Author) "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.