Stony the Road

Recinos' love for poetry dates back to being abandoned by Latino parents at age twelve to live on New York City streets. When he turned sixteen, he was taken into the family of a white Presbyterian minister and guided back to school. After finishing high school, Recinos attended undergraduate school in Ohio and graduate school in New York, where he befriended the Nuyorican poets Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri, who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Stony the Road engages life outside of mainstream American society and picks its way through places of despair and marginality to the revelations of belonging that protest indifference and inequality. The collection raises questions and proposes responses to the crisis of understanding in economic and political life, as well as the cultural narrative that America welcomes strangers. The poems tap into the changing mood of American life and the obscured world of rejected human beings and communities by exploring lives worth telling. ""Harold Recinos takes us on a long journey in this expansive collection of poems touching on the many challenges we face in light of current events. He gives us defiance in the face of injustice, faith in the face of despair, intimacy in the face of the impersonal, memory in the face of erasure, wisdom in the face of willful ignorance, and most importantly, honesty in the face of deceit."" --James Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University ""In a world where titans of power crush the life out of our Latinx communities, Recinos brandishes pen and palabra to strike down these bloodthirsty foes. His syncopated syntax and striking semiology reach deep into those conquests of time past and present that have noosed necks and obliterated our peoples. Yet, Recinos tunnels through this darkness into an exploding light of fellowship."" --Frederick Luis Aldama, The Ohio State University ""Harold Recinos' new book of poetry, Stony the Road, affirms the humanity of the dispossessed and shines an ethical light on the persistence of colonial violence that mars the gritty lives of the many. Stony the Road insists on love as the foundation of a just realm. Here ancient wisdom informs our world to exorcise the pathologies of power that plague us."" --Richard Perez, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY ""Powerful, poignant, and piercing, Recinos' poetry offers insights into the human experience that hearken back to a history of suffering and oppression, and to a present that offers new challenges and opportunities. Read it for fuel and to renew your passion for a better and more just world."" --Pedro A. Noguera, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his recent publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church; Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation; Crossing Bridges; Breathing Space; and After Eden. He earned a doctor of philosophy 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.