Overview

Words Chosen for the Wall is poetry testifying to the deepest elements in the American dream casting a light on cultural diversity, experiences of exclusion and belonging, and the walls of dividing hostility in society. It explores new paths that leap for unity, empathy, and hope. In this collection, poems give voice to experiences in a divided world and reach for beauty, unity, and emotional clarity. Like graffiti on walls, the poems call out various and different kinds of abuses and visions of life to quote Eliot ""at the still point of the turning world."" Each poem creates a space for the reader to bring their own baggage to a setting that questions idealized notions of community by offering lyrical words that speak to realities that are often ignored, or worse, forgotten. In this work, poems guide readers to the terrain of imagination that is a fine tool for repairing what is broken in society and that ceaselessly pleads for a solidarity of difference. These poems motivate dreams of a different existence and decolonize the imagination from the limitations of a single culture and understanding of life together.

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"""Words Chosen for the Wall is a conversation with country, oppressors, a silent God, love, and familia. Harold Recinos punches through the divide with the voice that stands with the wounded human. One moment you are walking along the river and the next on the edge of the earth at Machu Picchu, Recinos leaves no stone unturned in this collection, he throws everything at us, including the kitchen sink."" --Edward Vidaurre, author of By Throat, by Miracle: New & Selected Poems ""Amid prayers, protests, recollections, conjurings, and calls-to-action, Words Chosen for the Wall voices the particularities of a future archaeology for a world in ruin, where the wretched of the earth are not only given names but imprinted on public grounds. In this collection, Harold Recinos's poetry knows that the story of the street also tells the story of the 'living and everyone who now mourns.'"" --Christopher Rey P�rez, author of gauguin's notebook: a retrospective ""In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos sings an urban song of barrio youth who grapple against a nation intent on their destruction, while proudly tagging tenement walls with 'Ora Pro Nobis!' With rhythmic consistency, Recinos hews columnar stanzas that stand like lyrical candlesticks lit for Spanish Mass, like stipes of a bisected crucifix, like love letters inscribed on posts of cedar, pine, or cypress. With an interrogatory spirit and indelible voice, Recinos refines his poetics of Americana, class struggle, and Catholic liberation."" --Diego B�ez, author of Yaguaret� White: Poems ""Like an archeologist excavating layers in the cartographies of memory, Harold Recinos weaves the reader into piercing stories of childhood and the communal lives of a people who forge life from death and wholeness from the shards of time. The poems of this book are to be contemplated, for they will reveal the world of the poor and of the God who is encountered in the tenements of New York City, in the villages of El Salvador, in the rubble of Gaza, and in every rejected place where holiness has pitched its tent and dwells."" --Leo Guardado author of Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Forced Displacement ""Thomas Merton states that when people '[live] out of touch with other people they tend to lose that deep sense of spiritual realities which only pure love can give.' In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos finds God has become elusive in churches oblivious to people's lived realities. Recinos leads us in search for a God sometimes located where the marginalized congregate, where 'herbs from their tiny villages' are the greatest gifts."" Alma Rosa Alvarez, author of Liberation"

"""Words Chosen for the Wall is a conversation with country, oppressors, a silent God, love, and familia. Harold Recinos punches through the divide with the voice that stands with the wounded human. One moment you are walking along the river and the next on the edge of the earth at Machu Picchu, Recinos leaves no stone unturned in this collection, he throws everything at us, including the kitchen sink."" --Edward Vidaurre, author of By Throat, by Miracle: New & Selected Poems ""Amid prayers, protests, recollections, conjurings, and calls-to-action, Words Chosen for the Wall voices the particularities of a future archaeology for a world in ruin, where the wretched of the earth are not only given names but imprinted on public grounds. In this collection, Harold Recinos's poetry knows that the story of the street also tells the story of the 'living and everyone who now mourns.'"" --Christopher Rey P�rez, author of gauguin's notebook: a retrospective ""In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos sings an urban song of barrio youth who grapple against a nation intent on their destruction, while proudly tagging tenement walls with 'Ora Pro Nobis!' With rhythmic consistency, Recinos hews columnar stanzas that stand like lyrical candlesticks lit for Spanish Mass, like stipes of a bisected crucifix, like love letters inscribed on posts of cedar, pine, or cypress. With an interrogatory spirit and indelible voice, Recinos refines his poetics of Americana, class struggle, and Catholic liberation."" --Diego B�ez, author of Yaguaret� White: Poems ""Like an archeologist excavating layers in the cartographies of memory, Harold Recinos weaves the reader into piercing stories of childhood and the communal lives of a people who forge life from death and wholeness from the shards of time. The poems of this book are to be contemplated, for they will reveal the world of the poor and of the God who is encountered in the tenements of New York City, in the villages of El Salvador, in the rubble of Gaza, and in every rejected place where holiness has pitched its tent and dwells."" --Leo Guardado author of Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Forced Displacement ""Thomas Merton states that when people '[live] out of touch with other people they tend to lose that deep sense of spiritual realities which only pure love can give.' In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos finds God has become elusive in churches oblivious to people's lived realities. Recinos leads us in search for a God sometimes located where the marginalized congregate, where 'herbs from their tiny villages' are the greatest gifts."" Alma Rosa Alvarez, author of Liberation"

Author Information

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 literature dealing with undocumented Central American migrants and the Salvadoran diaspora. He has published numerous articles, chapters in collections, and written major works in Latino Theology, including 18 collections of poetry. Recently, two new collections of poetry were released, The Looking Glass: Far and Near and The Place across the River (under review for a Pulitzer Prize). Recinos's poetry has been featured in Anglican Theological Review, Weavings, Sojourners, Anabaptist Witness, The Arts, Perspective, Afro-Hispanic Review, Hispanic Theological Initiative, En Foco, among others. Since the early 1980s, Recinos has worked with and defended the civil and human rights of Salvadoran refugees in the States and in marginal communities in El Salvador.

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