#Review: Blood, Stone and Water by Richard Stimac

Blood, Water and Stone

Poet: Richard Stimac

Publisher: Spartan Press

Rating: ⅘

Richard Stimac’s Blood, Water, and Stone feels less like a poetry collection and more like sitting across from someone at a kitchen table while they slowly unpack generations of memory, grief, faith, migration, and inheritance. The poems are deeply rooted in the American Midwest, yet they constantly stretch outward—towards mythology, religion, rivers, war, and the fragile rituals that hold families together. 

What struck me first was how tactile these poems are. Stimac writes with the kind of detail that makes memory feel physical. In “Recipe,” for instance, the grandmother’s noodles become “thin ribbons, long as tendons tanned as sutures,” and suddenly cooking is no longer cooking—it becomes ancestry, survival, almost scripture.  The line “memory lives in the mouth, as taste, not words” may honestly be one of the strongest ideas in the entire collection.  It suggests that history is not archived in books alone, but in gestures, recipes, accents, habits, and grief passed down quietly.

The collection is divided into three sections—Blood, Water, and Stone—and the structure itself mirrors inheritance: blood as family and body, water as time and change, stone as permanence and ruin. The symbolism is obvious, yes, but never simplistic. Rivers appear repeatedly, sometimes as life, sometimes as decay. In “Ephemeral Streams,” the haunting question, “what then, when a river dies?” becomes ecological, spiritual, and national all at once. 

Stylistically, most poems are free verse, though some flirt with sonnet-like rhythm and internal rhyme. Stimac doesn’t rely on ornate vocabulary just to sound poetic. Instead, he uses plainspoken language loaded with metaphor. A line like “We don’t miss the ones we love, / but suffer with enduring memory” lands because it feels lived-in, not manufactured. 

There are multiple interpretations everywhere. “Limbo” can be read religiously, psychologically, or economically. “Cosmetics” is about femininity, performance, desire, and identity all at once. Even domestic objects—plastic fruit, rosaries, gold coins—become emotional artifacts.

What makes the collection memorable is that it never pretends to have answers. It simply keeps asking human questions in beautifully worn language. And somehow, that honesty becomes its own form of prayer. 

Find this book here.