Where the Sidewalks Meet

Harold J. Recinos

Dec 2021 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

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 Piñero and Pedro Pietri who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets café. 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.

About the author

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.