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The Shape of What Remains:
Land, Memory, and Moral Weight in TOPOLOGY,
poems by Richard Stimac
A REVIEW
Click here to explore or download TOPOLOGY, the free PDF chapbook.
Click on A REVIEW to download the free PDF review.
THE SHAPE OF WHAT REMAINS:
Land, Memory, and Moral Weight in Richard Stimac’s Topology
Topology
Richard Stimac
Buttonhook Press (An imprint of OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters)
2024
ISBN not listed
Rivers recur obsessively in Richard Stimac’s Topology, but they are never merely rivers. They are borders and erasures, archives and wounds, metaphors that the poet both relies upon and mistrusts. In poem after poem, Stimac returns to water—flowing, receding, polluted, dammed—not as a stable symbol but as a problem. “The river still divides, as each word divides / the named and the unknown,” he writes in “Confluence,” announcing one of the book’s central tensions: language itself is both connective tissue and fracture.
Topology is a meditation on land, memory, labor, inheritance, and mortality, but it is equally a sustained inquiry into how meaning is mapped—onto bodies, landscapes, histories—and how those maps inevitably fail. This is not a pastoral collection, though it is deeply rooted in place. Nor is it purely confessional, though family, grief, faith, and shame recur with brutal clarity. Instead, Stimac offers a long-form ethical reckoning with the Midwest as lived geography: industrial, post-industrial, sacred, poisoned, remembered, and imagined.
This chapbook-length collection reads like a single, carefully folded terrain. Each poem marks a coordinate, and together they form a topological study of how lives are shaped by forces both visible and subterranean.
LAND, HISTORY, AND MORAL SEDIMENT
At the heart of Topology is the idea that nothing is ever cleanly buried. The land remembers. In poems such as “Field Work,” “Rhizomes,” and “Salvage,” gardening and excavation become ethical acts. To dig is never neutral. Beneath raised beds and lawns lie “buried histories, forgotten lives,” and the speaker repeatedly confronts his own complicity in systems of ownership, law, and selective attention.
This ethical unease intensifies when personal history intersects with national and ecological history. In “Liberty Tree,” a dried riverbed reveals not only environmental collapse but racial terror, culminating in the lynching of Francis McIntosh. The poem refuses metaphorical comfort; the landscape itself is an archive of violence. Similarly, “Slag” and “Tender” explore coal mining and industrial labor not as nostalgia but as slow catastrophe—one whose toxic afterlife seeps into bodies, water tables, and memory.
Yet Topology is not a polemic. Stimac’s strength lies in his willingness to implicate himself. Again and again, the speaker names his own failures: indifference, silence, retreat. In “Field Work,” the admission is stark: “My sin is indifference.” This ethical self-scrutiny gives the book its gravity and prevents its ecological or historical concerns from becoming abstract.
FAMILY, FAITH, AND THE BODY
Running parallel to the land’s history is the intimate geography of family. Poems like “Evergreen,” “Gardening,” “Highland,” “Jefferson Barracks,” and the title poem “Topology” trace a lineage of fathers, mothers, grandparents, and inherited silences. These poems are unsentimental yet deeply affecting, especially in their treatment of masculinity, labor, and emotional restraint.
Faith appears throughout the collection, but always under interrogation. Catholic imagery—rosaries, Mary, saints, crucifixes—recurs, not as comfort but as unresolved inheritance. In “Evergreen,” shame becomes theological: “It’s the non-saying / that’s the real sin.” Naming, or failing to name, is repeatedly linked to moral responsibility. The body itself becomes a theological site, culminating in the extraordinary title poem, where the speaker stands before his father’s aging body and recognizes it as a complete archive: “His body contained the multitude of his story.”
Here, Stimac’s project clarifies: topology is not geometry. It is not fixed measurement but relational shape—the way forms persist even as surfaces erode.
CRAFT & FORM
Stylistically, Topology is anchored in long-lined free verse that allows for narrative, meditation, and lyric compression to coexist. Stimac frequently deploys enjambment to destabilize meaning, forcing the reader to reconsider assumptions mid-line. His diction moves fluidly between the scientific (“alluvia,” “rhizomes,” “karst”), the biblical, and the domestic, reinforcing the book’s insistence that these registers are inseparable.
Imagery is consistently tactile: silt, slag, snow, sweat, soot, water, bone. The poems are dense without being opaque, intellectual without sacrificing emotional force. While some pieces—particularly later in the book—risk discursiveness, the accumulation feels intentional. This is a book that wants to weigh on the reader, to sediment slowly.
Structurally, the collection is thematically ordered rather than chronological, allowing motifs to echo and deepen. Rivers appear early and often, but their meanings shift—from origin to boundary to exhaustion—mirroring the speaker’s evolving understanding.
One of the collection’s most striking passages appears in “Confluence,” where language itself becomes a river system:
“the black letters and white negative
spaces flow side by side, each denoting
the other. Civilization and barbarism
record reflected images, form one channel
with its swept sediment and eternal crawl
to the sea.”
Elsewhere, in “Topology,” the body is rendered as landscape with devastating clarity:
“I mark my father’s body, each part a distinct span of life…
His body contained the multitude of his story.”
Such moments exemplify Stimac’s ability to yoke abstraction to lived experience without dilution.
Topology is a demanding, intelligent, and morally serious book. It asks the reader to sit with discomfort—to recognize the ways land, language, and history implicate us whether we acknowledge them or not. While its density may challenge readers accustomed to minimalism or quick lyric payoff, those willing to engage deeply will find a work of considerable resonance.
Richard Stimac has written a collection that refuses easy redemption. Instead, it offers attention as an ethical act: to look, to remember, to name, and to accept the limits of those gestures. Topology will particularly reward readers interested in ecopoetics, place-based writing, working-class histories, and poetry that grapples honestly with faith and doubt.
This is a book not to be skimmed but traversed—slowly, deliberately—like a river whose course cannot be fully known until one has followed it, word by word, to the sea.
Click here to explore or download TOPOLOGY, the free PDF chapbook.
Image: I’m Sorry Dave #15 (AI-assisted digital art) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
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