Wading in the River
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
Wading in the River offers a poetic voice about the wonders of the world in the context of daily struggles with marginality and discloses the agency of cultural actors in them. The collection’s poems tell a story of longing and loss, injustice and resilience, terror and beauty, anguish and hope for society. Wading in the River offers readers the subject matter that enjoins personal experience to public life and puts a human face on abstractions like justice, poverty, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, police brutality, politics, and religion. In these poems, words seek to cut through the complexity of perception to expansively loosen a new way to find visionary clarity and to think passionately about dark spaces in social reality.
Endorsements (5)
“In a time of renewed bigotry and demonization, Harold Recinos records and celebrates the lives of brown and Spanish-speaking Americans struggling and prevailing against the odds: ‘heaven is a long walk / away from the cutting / English of these streets.’ The poet’s brief, cascading lines convey an equal sense of urgency and intimacy—aspects that abet the collection’s key themes of dispossession, faith, and the unkillable longing for justice, progress, and true inclusion. Wading in the River is a devoted, impassioned, and moving book.”
“Harold Recinos’ Wading in the River is a tour de force into politics, philosophy, religion, race, and humanity. This collection is a balm in pandemic times when we need beauty, love, and possibilities. Professor Recinos provides much-needed bread to our hungry souls.”
“Against the worship, so prevalent in these violent times, of a God who establishes borders, the One who drives away our enemies in fear before us, Harold J. Recinos offers in Wading in the River a sounder theology, in praise of ‘a God who crosses borders’ and ‘the One who will gather us / in the dark, give life to the dead / and wipe away tears from the faces / of the frightened.’”
“‘I am brown America,’ Harold Recinos writes in ‘América,’ one of the gems of his newest collection, Wading in the River, which gathers together the range of Latinx life and experience and so much more. Rich in allusions, abounding with vision, lyric to its core, Wading in the River is a poetic treasure.”
“Wading in the River is animated by a theopoetics of lo cotidiano. Rooted in our precarious and pandemic times, the poems of Harold Recinos chronicle the intensity of daily living from social and racial unrest in our cities to state-sanctioned cruelty at our southern border. He lays bare the damage done to bodies marginalized by the machinations of a dysfunctional president and reveals resistance unleashed from unexpected cyberspaces by ‘TikTok teens and K-Pop fans.’ Composed in barrio beats of his familiar streets en el Bronx, and with lyrical Latin@ì playfulness with dos lenguas, ‘a sofrito English, refried words with a taste of órale people,’ Recinos calls us together ‘to weep for the God who has been driven into exile!’”
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