Overview

The Bags We Carry is poetry that offers a linguistic painting of public culture leaving one with images, triggered thoughts, and a mix of feelings about bearing open the hopes, struggles, and vulnerabilities of human beings yearning for the kind of truth rationality alone overlooks. These poems will not give directions to Times Square nor provide facts such as historians, scientists, or journalists do; instead, this work delivers news by inviting readers to dream into a different existence, decolonize the imagination from the limitations of a single culture, and invest social reality with the action that bends society in the direction of a solidarity of difference. The Bags We Carry is poetry describing aspects of the human condition and an art form that issues forth from the margins from which overlooked human beings aim to discern the meaning of belonging, truth, and justice. This collection of poetry is a way for the creative imagination to articulate the sacred, pose new questions about religious faith in human experience, and explore issues of truth in society, especially understood not as support for the prevailing cultural order, but the perpetual undoing and remaking of it.

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Reviews

""Harold Recinos testifies to the forgotten, the forsaken, the unseen, and the unrecorded. He is the poet of tamale makers, dish washers, citizens who remember the Mesoamerican sky. His prayers, songs, and tales have an inverse side that can be seen as invectives, demands, and truths. His lyrics are indictments, declarations, and instruments against invisibility. These poems are countermeasures that defy the 'syntax of hate.' They are small sacramental cracks in armor of empire."" --Bruce Smith, author of Hungry Ghost ""In The Bags We Carry, Recinos offers a collection that is textured, humanizing, and urgent. His poetry makes visible those who are ordinarily invisible in our society, especially those whose dignity is often assaulted by death dealing forces. For Recinos, each poem is an act of prayer, an act of hope, and an act of resistance."" --Nichole M. Flores, author of The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy ""With straightforward and compassionate language, these poems rehumanize those who have been repeatedly dehumanized by the rhetoric of those in positions of power and privilege. Recinos bears witness to the systemic injustices of the United States in order to repeatedly and effectively contest what he so rightly calls the 'syntax of hate.' Through surprising juxtapositions and lively line breaks, these pieces invite us to commune with the wino, the Buddha, the abuela on her way to church, with Saint Óscar Romero, Billie Holiday, and Maya Angelou, and with the far-flung geographies of El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Florida, and the Bronx all at once, all pulled into the space of the page like a white-hot and urgent prayer."" --John Burns, author of Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age ""Harold Recinos's poems entwine with a complex but necessary tradition of Spanish Humanism, extending those roots over the structural collapse of national orders and the global consensus that has held those orders, tenuously and often troublingly, in place. In place of that ongoing collapse, Harold Recinos's newest collection of poems, The Bags We Carry, abides with the spirit of individual dignity, ethical inquiry, practical faith, and necessary reform. These are poems from a deep philosophical and theological history made for our challenged times."" --Edgar Garcia, author of Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu ""In his newest poetry collection, Harold Recinos's speaker carries with him the literal and symbolic weight of belonging, safety, acceptance, and the search for dignity in the face of fear we live with during these authoritarian times. With Hispanic and minority communities at the forefront of this daring and important book, we--as readers, citizens, activists--are led to question whether it's foolish to 'think God has forgotten the ones who / suffer.' But behind every raid, every corrupt scandal, every morsel of doubt that makes us question our faith, there are abuelas armed with an abundance of warmth, strangers extending their callused hands, and music that pours into our souls as though it had come straight from Eden. For every tragedy, The Bags We Carry reminds us there is a triumph soon awaiting, and whether we chose to believe in the goodness of humanity or not, under Recinos's lyrical care and narrative arc, we are given a chance to experience 'sweet and gracious love.'"" --Esteban Rodríguez, author of The Lost Nostalgias

Author Information

Harold J. Recinos is Professor of Church and Society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (2006), Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (as editor, 2011), Where the Sidewalks Meet (Wipf & Stock, 2022), The Looking Glass: Far and Near (Resource, 2023), and Words Chosen for the Wall (Resource, 2024). He completed his doctor of philosophy with honors in cultural anthropology from the American University in Washington, DC.

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