Recinos' love for poetry dates back to being raised on the tormented streets of the South Bronx and the experience of being abandoned by Latino parents at age twelve. On the streets, Recinos discovered a world of extreme poverty and drugs, until four years later he was taken in by a White Presbyterian minister and guided back into school. When in graduate school in New York City, he befriended Nuyorican poets Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri, who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets cafe. Recinos' poetry makes a connection between the poetic imagination, social criticism, and the meaning of life together in a diverse society. No Room is poetry that creates a fusion between the personal and the public in verse that is searching, expansive, and walking hurt streets. In this collection, Recinos encourages readers to use their imagination to live into invisible publics and to pause in the places where the voiceless speak. No Room offers images, feelings, and stories that crack dividing walls of hostility and nativist prohibitions and capture the full complexity of life experienced from the barrio to the American public square.
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), After Eden (2018), Stony the Road (2019), and The Coming Day (2019). He completed his doctor of philosophy with honors (PhD) 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.
“Spare, fierce and powerful. . . . No Room is a revelation. Open to any page and have your breath taken away by this extraordinary writer.”
—Junot Díaz, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“It is a safe hunch that our best critical theology is done in poetic idiom that crosses boundaries, offends niceties, and dares beyond evidence. This collection of poems by Harold Recinos makes that bet a sure thing. Recinos is alert to the lived reality with all of its wounds, hates, and deathliness. He is, moreover, alive to holy force that surges among us. Best of all he is alive to the capacity of rhetoric to probe the depths of systemic violence to hope in honesty that denies nothing.”
—Walter Brueggemann, author of The Prophetic Imagination
“As the counterpoint to longstanding American silences, the images in Harold Recinos’ No Room unlock an honest history. Border walls, desert crossings, plagues, and lynching trees—signs of a waning democracy—inundate this collection. Above all, the poems in No Room seek justice. Now and again, they also signal renewal, community, and joy.”
—Teresa Longo, author of Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U. S. Presses and Progressive Social Change
“In this new collection of poems, Harold Recinos reminds us what it means to remember as a means of strengthening our gratitude for the precious gift of life. These poems come as prophetic words always do—to unsettle our complacencies and embolden us to face the indignities of this world with the stronger resolve of compassionate justice. They are the witness of one who dares to dream in the midst of this world’s evils, refusing to be silenced by the guardians of the old order of racism and disordered patriotism. They will offend those who insist that faith is simply another form of blind loyalty to the state, but will fortify all who desire to share the poet’s dream of a just and merciful world where dignity is a divine birthright given to all, and equality the measure of what democracy is meant to be.”
—Mark S. Burrows, translator, scholar of historical theology, and author of The Chance of Home: Poems