Word Simple

Recinos discovered a love for poetry after being abandoned by Latino immigrant parents and living on the streets dealing with drugs, poverty, violence, racial discrimination, and existential desolation. After several homeless years, he was taken into the family of a white Presbyterian minister and guided back to school. Later, attending graduate school in New York City, Recinos befriended Nuyorican poets the late Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets cafe. Word Simple is a collection of poetry that raises questions about how society is constructed from the context of people who are routinely silenced by history. Recinos' poems describe the realities of faith, love, struggle, migration, refugee flight, urban depravity, the politics of hate, and the fierce anger of the indignity of a life of marginality in society. His poetry not only expresses outrage and despair in the face of unjust suffering in the world, but he projects the struggles and beauty of invisible people who tilt always toward recognition. By his choice of subjects in his poetry, Recinos provides readers with sensitive and ethical resources to show the horror and joys of life. Graffiti on a page!

""Harold Recinos is a poet of witness and great humanity. His words are weighty and his poetry is carefully crafted into song. There's a healthy combination of Whitman and Pietri in his voice. His work resonates with the kind of power and beauty that will change your life.""
--Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems

""A poetry of such street-vision, precise lament, and gritty honor you'd think the ethics would burden the music, sinking it with the 'drowned voices.' But no--Recinos' 'clouds crowning school children's heads,' his 'stirs of sweet life,' throb and pulse with the dark beauty of a yet possible life.""
--Catherine Keller, author of Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement

""With surgical precision, Recinos singles out just the right word and image that drop us deep into the pains, sorrows, and joys of what it means to be Latinx in the United States today. With the concision of poetic form, Recinos weaves together the many voices that make up the tapestry of nuestra America: our tios and tias, our mamas and papas, bricklayers, janitors, and those with bloodied feet forced to cross borders with the promise of surviving another.""
--Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands


Harold J. Recinos is professor of Church and Society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among recent publications are Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Roman and Littlefield, 2011) and Other Seasons (Wipf and Stock, 2017), among other works. In 1993, Recinos completed the Doctor of Philosophy with honors in cultural anthropology at the American University in Washington, DC.