"In a time of renewed bigotry and demonization, Harold Recinos records and celebrates the lives of brown and Spanish-speaking Americans struggling and prevailing against the odds: 'heaven is a long walk / away from the cutting / English of these streets.' The poet's brief, cascading lines convey an equal sense of urgency and intimacy--aspects that abet the collection's key themes of dispossession, faith, and the unkillable longing for justice, progress, and true inclusion. Wading in the River is a devoted, impassioned, and moving book." --Cyrus Cassells, author of Pulitzer Prize nominee Soul Make a Path through Shouting "Harold Recinos' Wading in the River is a tour de force into politics, philosophy, religion, race, and humanity. This collection is a balm in pandemic times when we need beauty, love, and possibilities. Professor Recinos provides much-needed bread to our hungry souls." --Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America "Against the worship, so prevalent in these violent times, of a God who establishes borders, the One who drives away our enemies in fear before us, Harold J. Recinos offers in Wading in the River a sounder theology, in praise of 'a God who crosses borders' and 'the One who will gather us / in the dark, give life to the dead / and wipe away tears from the faces / of the frightened.

' --H. L. Hix, professor, MFA Poetry Faculty, Fairleigh Dickinson University "'I am brown America,' Harold Recinos writes in 'América,' one of the gems of his newest collection, Wading in the River , which gathers together the range of Latinx life and experience and so much more. Rich in allusions, abounding with vision, lyric to its core, Wading in the River is a poetic treasure." --John Keene, author of Counternarratives " Wading in the River is animated by a theopoetics of lo cotidiano . Rooted in our precarious and pandemic times, the poems of Harold Recinos chronicle the intensity of daily living from social and racial unrest in our cities to state-sanctioned cruelty at our southern border. He lays bare the damage done to bodies marginalized by the machinations of a dysfunctional president and reveals resistance unleashed from unexpected cyberspaces by 'TikTok teens and K-Pop fans.' Composed in barrio beats of his familiar streets en el Bronx, and with lyrical Latin@ì playfulness with dos lenguas, 'a sofrito English, refried words with a taste of órale people,' Recinos calls us together 'to weep for the God who has been driven into exile!' --Carmen Nanko-Fernández, author of Theologizing en Espanglish.