Books by Harold J. Recinos
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About

Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (2006), Wading through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (editor, 2011), Where the Sidewalks Meet (2022), The Days You Bring (2022) and The Looking Glass: Far and Near (2023). He completed his PhD with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has worked with the Salvadoran refugee community and with marginal communities in El Salvador on issues of human rights.  I can tell you that poetry looked for me in the barrio, on the subway, city parks, streets, stoops, corners, churches, and overlooked public spaces. I have always thought poetry is graffiti on public culture, lines about the mixed feelings of learned truth that originate from the permanent Spanglish knot in my throat.

Harold J. Recinos

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A different world The Midwest I went to college in the Midwest

The Midwest

I went to college in

the Midwest that had

never seen a Latinx

face, classmates laughed

whenever I let Spanish

fly like pigeons from my

mouth and starched shirt

pastors sighed when I

kneeled at the altar rail

to pray in my first and

mother tongue. the cops

threw me in jail simply

for looking too Puerto

Rican in their bigoted

little town and making

me out to be everything

they decided I had to be

save a student at a Lilly

white school. they did

not know I came from

a place where even the

little...

Playing

the sound of playful kids

attaches itself to the night

on the block. the gaiety in

the air is like the restless

hope of walks begun months

ago in places far away. they

deliciously touch our hearts

lifting hours of misfortune

and shield everyone awake

waiting for peace doves to

fly overhead.

h. j. Recinos

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