"This beautiful and powerful collection of poems and testimonios captures the heart and soul of the Latino experience in the New America. A remarkable montage of images, feelings, and expressions that lift the spirit and plumb the depth and promises of the American experience." -Gaston Espinosa, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies, Claremont McKenna College. Author of Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith & Politics in Action (Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Religion, Race, & Barack Obama's New Democratic Pluralism (New York: Routledge, 2013).
"This is poetry of the soul. It turns disquiet into revelation."-Ilan Stavans, Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, Amherst College. Author of Quixote: The Novel and the World (N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015) and Borges, the Jew. (State University of New York Press, 2016).
Crossing Bridges expresses a tension between the fluidity of a river and the stubborn cold toughness of a wall that endeavors to mark a border to naturalize separation and division. The poet Harold Recinos' greatest achievement, what is moving about his writing, and I'm sure will touch the readers as well, is his lyrical and moral commitment to challenge walls and to flow relentless, even if painfully, opening cracks in them. Recinos challenges the wall and nativist prohibitions, and bets the common good can be experienced with the people in el barrio. To read these poems is to start to live in el barrio del mundo. -Francisco Morán, Professor of Latin American Literature, Southern Methodist University, Author of Martí, la justicia infinita [1875-1894]). Madrid: Verbum, 2014, and Island Of My Hunger / Isla de mi hambre. Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Cuban Poetry. City Lights: San Francisco, 2007.
Harold Recinos' Puerto Rican mother and Guatemalan father came to the United States motivated least by the American dream, than a desperate flight from a life of misery and despair. Their story like that of so many Latino families new to the United States was one of social exclusion and permanent poverty. Crossing Bridges is for Recinos a way to give voice to the overlooked world of Latino men, women and children at the edges of society. The poems in this collection are Recinos' graffiti on the wall of public culture and his way of embracing those who are made invisible and treated unworthy of being heard and touched. Crossing Bridges is an act of remembrance grounded in ethnic identity that seeks to dignify the loathed humanity of the barrio and communicate a deeper understanding of forgotten places.
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 (WJKP, 2006), Harold J. Recinos, ed. Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Roman and Littlefield, 2011); Voices on the Corner (Wipf and Stock, 2015); Long Way Home (Floricanto Press, 2016). He completed the Doctor of Philosophy with honors (Ph.D.) in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, D.C.. Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has worked with the Salvadoran refugee community and with marginal communities in El Salvador on issues of human rights.