Cornered by the Dark

His indignation at injustice, his loving attentiveness to the least and lowest remind us that we create better communities, countries, selves by the quality of attention we bring to bear.

A beautiful, mesmerizing collection. The supremely gifted Recinos is working the height of his formidable powers and Cornered by the Dark is a triumph.

Cornered by the Dark is a beautiful and moving collection of poems that provides vigor and rhythmic elegance to a community of migrants who have left behind the world they knew and have arrived in urban United States, surrounded by a strange language, different cultural traditions, and, worst of all, the xenophobia and racism that tragically prevails in this North American nation. It reminds me of the poetics that pervades biblical sacred scriptures; literature that saturates both seductive language and solidarity with the denigrated and misplaced peoples of the earth. In several of these enticing versus the role of the church is significant and crucial, either for either the well-being or the tragic fate of the migrants. Especially attractive and suggestive I find the children in Recinos’ poetics, those boys and girls who face the challenge to creatively survive in a strange, daring and demanding land, a place where many of them are cornered by the dark.

Recinos has always been a voice of compassion and orientation, a voice for dignity and justice. It is a voice that I have followed and admired over the decades. That voice reveals more depth and verve than ever in the present collection of poems. Indeed, ‘cornered by the dark’ as we all are in these times of social and cultural upheaval, these poems shed light, much light, much needed light, on a path forward.

Archbishop Óscar Romero, lamenting government control of the media in El Salvador, preached from the pulpit that “A journalist either speaks the truth or he or she is no longer a journalist.” The same can be said of the poet. Harold Recinos, a worthy upholder of Romero’s legacy, always speaks truth to power. In an age when the media self-censors for profit, and police departments continue to brutalize and execute black and brown bodies with impunity, Recinos draws deep from the wells of Latinx spirituality and urban experience to provide a vision of hope in the darkness—a vision in which the absence of God in the midst of human suffering is answered by the sacramentality of something as mundane as the Sunday movies.

Harold Recinos’ poems make visible the migrants and border-crossers, and the workers on whose labor we depend. He tackles all the tough subjects—loss, neighborhoods under threat, injustice and senseless violence, death. He also reminds us to search for what may endure—faith, family, and community. This book reminded me of all the reasons I love to read poetry and why I need to read more.

These poems help us dare to believe in the God whose promised kingdom is coming on earth, as in heaven, affirming that ‘there is a presence/ on these chilly nights, a Spirit moving// with the certainty that was even before/ time, and I hear news whispered that// life is beaded with grace.’ And they remind us of the promise that America is an experiment in radical homecoming—for all those who dare to trust against the odds that there is a balm in Gilead.