"Spare, fierce and powerful. No Room is a revelation. Open to any page and have your breath taken away by this extraordinary writer." --Junot Díaz, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao "It is a safe hunch that our best critical theology is done in poetic idiom that crosses boundaries, offends niceties, and dares beyond evidence. This collection of poems by Harold Recinos makes that bet a sure thing. Recinos is alert to the lived reality with all of its wounds, hates, and deathliness. He is, moreover, alive to holy force that surges among us. Best of all he is alive to the capacity of rhetoric to probe the depths of systemic violence to hope in honesty that denies nothing.
" --Walter Brueggemann, author of The Prophetic Imagination "As the counterpoint to longstanding American silences, the images in Harold Recinos' No Room unlock an honest history. Border walls, desert crossings, plagues, and lynching trees--signs of a waning democracy--inundate this collection. Above all, the poems in No Room seek justice. Now and again, they also signal renewal, community, and joy." --Teresa Longo, author of Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U. S. Presses and Progressive Social Change "In this new collection of poems, Harold Recinos reminds us what it means to remember as a means of strengthening our gratitude for the precious gift of life. These poems come as prophetic words always do--to unsettle our complacencies and embolden us to face the indignities of this world with the stronger resolve of compassionate justice.
They are the witness of one who dares to dream in the midst of this world's evils, refusing to be silenced by the guardians of the old order of racism and disordered patriotism. They will offend those who insist that faith is simply another form of blind loyalty to the state, but will fortify all who desire to share the poet's dream of a just and merciful world where dignity is a divine birthright given to all, and equality the measure of what democracy is meant to be." --Mark S. Burrows, translator, scholar of historical theology, and author of The Chance of Home: Poems.