The Bags We Carry

Harold J. Recinos

Jan 2026 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

The Bags We Carry is poetry that offers a linguistic painting of public culture leaving one with images, triggered thoughts, and a mix of feelings about bearing open the hopes, struggles, and vulnerabilities of human beings yearning for the kind of truth rationality alone overlooks. These poems will not give directions to Times Square nor provide facts such as historians, scientists, or journalists do; instead, this work delivers news by inviting readers to dream into a different existence, decolonize the imagination from the limitations of a single culture, and invest social reality with the action that bends society in the direction of a solidarity of difference. The Bags We Carry is poetry describing aspects of the human condition and an art form that issues forth from the margins from which overlooked human beings aim to discern the meaning of belonging, truth, and justice. This collection of poetry is a way for the creative imagination to articulate the sacred, pose new questions about religious faith in human experience, and explore issues of truth in society, especially understood not as support for the prevailing cultural order, but the perpetual undoing and remaking of it.

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 The Bags We Carry (2026), On The Sight of Angels (2025), Words Chosen for the Wall (2024), Where the Sidewalks Meet (2022), The Days You Bring (2022) and The Looking Glass: Far and Near (2023). He completed his PhD with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Recinos says, "I can tell you that poetry looked for me in the barrio, on the subway, city parks, streets, stoops, corners, churches, and overlooked public spaces. I have always thought poetry is graffiti on public culture, lines about the mixed feelings of learned truth that originate from the permanent Spanglish knot in my throat."