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Recinos' love for poetry began on the tormented streets of the South Bronx and the experience of being abandoned by Latino parents at age twelve to live on them. On the streets, Recinos discovered a world of extreme poverty and drugs, until four years later he was taken into the family of a White Presbyterian minister and guided back into school. In graduate school in New York City, Recinos befriended the Nuyorican poets the late Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri, who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets cafe. After Dark is poetry that speaks distinctively of the cultural and worldly experience of Black and Brown humanity driven by the resilience and challenging worlds that impose human limitations. Recinos uses the poetic instrument to enable readers to hear the history and share the experiences of people who see hope in "the brutal atmosphere / of this land of purple mountain majesties / lashed to fierce grief." Recinos is a poet who writes between the lines and with a Spanglish vision for life.
Harold J. Recinos is Professor of Church and Society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He completed a PhD with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Among his publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (WJKP, 2006); Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Roman & Littlefield, 2011); Stony the Road (Wipf & Stock, 2019); The Coming Day (Wipf & Stock, 2019); and Wading in the River (Wipf & Stock, 2021). Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has worked with the Salvadoran refugee community and with marginal communities in El Salvador on issues of human rights.
“In a world that threatens our daily extinction, I race quicksilver to the ephemera made flesh in the sensoria dreamed by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Machado, Gabriela Mistral, Sor Juana, Ernesto Cardenal—and Harold Recinos. In his poems, imperious walls violently divide and tears of loss and unbelonging lacerate souls. Yet again this wordsmith extraordinaire jolts us back alive to the power of our life force: creativity, curiosity, and fellowship!”
—Frederick Luis Aldama, Ohio State University
“After Dark, while presented as a poetry collection, is better understood as liturgy. Open this book and let love lift you up and break your heart. Through his achingly beautiful words, Harold Recinos asks that his readers labor for justice to remake American society—a society that has failed to meet the basic human needs of too many of our Latino sisters and brothers, especially their precious children, our precious children.”
—Lori Marie Carlson, author of Cool Salsa, Red Hot Salsa and The Sunday Tertulia
“Protest poetry is deliberate and unafraid in the capable hands of Harold Recinos. In this collection you will hear an authentic poet possessing a quintessential American voice that echoes with Langston, Piñero, and Angelou, all shouting, ‘This is what you have killed, America!’”
—Ernesto Quiñonez, Cornell University
“Like Walt Whitman, who found ‘letters of God dropt in the street,’ Harold Recinos finds in the ‘sacramental gutter’ the reliquaries and names of the exiled, banished, and broken by a hostile, almost fatal country. From his side of the Jordan, he sings in a braided Spanish and English—sometimes with a white hand around his throat—of tortured brown bodies and a contested notion of ‘home.’ He is a magus who recognizes and subverts the savage. He is a minister who attends to Bronx musicians, barrio residents, Breonna Taylor, and border crossers, delivering ‘just the right amount of Spanish balm.’ His is a blistering, prophetic song. He is unafraid, indefatigable, and necessary.”
—Bruce Smith, Syracuse University
“With his own style of grammar and flow of language, with each poem Recinos steadily indicts America’s racism and hypocrisy—reduces the lies of its political system and false prophets (more in it for the money and power than for God) to dust under the steady beat of the poems hammering on the anvil of his heart, his pain, his hope, his dreams—every kid in school should read this book. It’s a must!”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of Laughing in the Light
“After Dark is graced by an urgent, persistent, liberatory voice that at one moment dreams of reaching ‘all the way / to God’s ear’ and at another condemns ‘the monstrous nationalist / leaving the White House.’ Similarly, the poems in this collection honor ‘a worker / who sweats for a petty wage’ as well as ‘dark children chewing / on bitter bread’ and ‘perishing on / this wounded earth.’ After Dark makes clear that Recinos is a poet who has been gifted with an endless fount of benevolence and is guided by a faith rooted in love, humanity, and compassion.”
—Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, St. Mary's College of Maryland
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