No Room

Harold J. Recinos

Jul 2020 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

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.

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), 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.