Description: On the Sight of Angels is poetry that makes the American context the focus of thinking, imagination, and observation to cast a light on experiences of exclusion and belonging. The poetry in this collection is presented as a mode of knowing knotted with a larger world of human experiences, giving voice to both social divisions and new possibilities of life together. Poetry carries the reader beyond intellectual meaning into the terrain of emotional, imaginative, and experiential meaning that provides ways to envision and distinctively understand the world. In part, this collection of poetry is a way to articulate the sacred, pose new questions about God in human experience, and explore issues of society that request its continuous undoing and remaking. In a time of diminished concern for justice and equality, the poems in this collection offer readers a way to reimagine an ethic focused on a solidarity of difference. In this collection, poems show the facts of everyday life may be invested with a meaning that is capable of inspiring people to bend social reality in the direction of the justice needed to repair the common good.
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."