The Place across the River

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Written By Open Plaza

Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos presents excerpts from his newest collection of poetry

 

HTI Open Plaza presents a story map comprising curated images and excerpts from The Place across the River (Resource Publications, 2024), a collection of poetry by Harold J. Recinos that “addresses defective systems of culture, politics, religion, and social relationship with poetic discourse reflecting the predicament of the abandoned and rejected whose voices carry little social power.” We are grateful to Rev. Dr. Recinos for his invaluable contributions to HTI Open Plaza’s growing Poetry Series over the years.

 

POET’S NOTE

For me, the poetic imagination is a way to articulate the sacred, pose new questions about God in the human experience, and explore issues of society that request itsthe perpetual undoing and remaking of it.   Poetry motivates dreams of a different existence, decolonizes the imagination from the limitations of a single culture, and frees God-talk from the imperialist mind-set of a singular understanding.  The barrio taught me to write poems about the world of marginality, a divided society, the silence of God, the status-shackled church, the politics of hate, the loathed and disregarded. I must tell you, then, that poetry is a way for me to untie the knot in my throat, to share the voices beneath it.

–Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos

 
 
 

“The richness, uniqueness, and legacy of Ibero-Indigeno-Africano Humanism soars in this new collection by Harold Recinos. Undergirded by an abiding, radical Christian faith, The Place across the River transports the hyper-situatedness of the dispossessed, the alienated, the refugee, the forgotten, the cursed, into a Cathedral of Light, whose dazzling poems splash us with the conviction needed to elevate our sense of justice and social transformation.”

—Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point

 

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Harold Recinos

Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. A cultural anthropologist, he specializes in work and ethnographic writing dealing with undocumented Central American migrants and the Salvadoran diaspora. He has published numerous articles, chapters in collections, and written major works in theology and culture, including ten collections of poetry. His most recent collections of poetry, all published by Resource Publications/Wipf & Stock, are: No Room (2020), Wading in the River (2021), After Dark (2021), The Days You Bring (2022)—nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry—The Looking Glass (2023), Tell Somebody (2023), and The Place across the River (2024). Rev. Dr. Recinos’s poetry has also been featured in Anglican Theological Review, Weavings, Sojourners, Anabaptist Witness, The Arts, Afro-Hispanic Review, and Perspective, among others.

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