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Recinos's love for poetry began on the 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. In Where the Sidewalks Meet, Recinos uses poetry like graffiti on public culture, to make references to the invisible in plain sight, and talk about border crossings. These poems delicately string together the disregarded world of excluded, muted, and rejected human beings and "shouts out the names" of those the world only cares to look at sideways.
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 (edited, 2011), Stony the Road (2019), The Coming Day (2019) and Wading in the River (2021). He completed a 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.
“This is a view of the inside of the other side of the America that’s seldom seen with such bravado and honesty in American poetry—an immigrant Black and Brown America ripped open by White rage and indifference. Recinos’s view of the role Christianity plays in all this is equally profound and original. These are poems that needed to be written—truthful, often-enraged poems written by and for the soul.”
—Philip Schultz, author of The God of Loneliness
“Written with immeasurable grit and grace. Recinos is an unfeigned apostle for minor voices. . . . With a gentle ambush motivating every poem, Where the Sidewalks Meet is an unabridged testament for how to listen, sense, feel, experience those who get ‘used to the world looking at [them] sideways’; for in Recinos’s stunning stanzas, every line is an imperative, an intention for a more honorable universe.”
—Sandra Ruiz, author of Ricanness
“In Where the Sidewalks Meet, a poetic consciousness roams New York, creating a cartography of the inner-city experience. These poems exist at the crossroad of life, history, and consciousness. Fast-paced as urban life itself, these verses demand to be read aloud, sometimes like a vignette evoking childhood, sometimes like a diary, sometimes as a statement of values, sometimes as a cry for help and social justice, sometimes as a prayer for the fallen, but always as living poetry.”
—Carlos Aguasaco, author of The New York City Subway Poems
“Compassion swings the lines here in this poetry of openhearted vision . . . . ‘Sweet words’ witness life on the margins of the American myth. We can see the stars right alongside the scars, the spangles right next to the anguish, and the angels in the Spanglish informing these propulsive prayers, which sometimes turn from grief to glory and back in a single well-turned phrase. A beautiful, layered, heartful reading experience.”
—Maria Damon, author of Postliterary America
“Where the Sidewalks Meet is a robust book that calls out and combats the wickedness of a national imagination that would dispossess its people. . . . Recinos leans into poetry’s direct power to (re)name the forces threatening our shared humanity—ignorance, bigotry, fear—and the effect is a resonance that reckons with the risk, an intensity that tries to ‘restart [the] heart,’ poems that hold if not yoke us across a country of difference.”
—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler
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