Description:
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 Piñero 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.
Brief description: 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."