Cornered by the Dark: Poems

W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Howard Thurman, Julia Equivel, Thomas Merton, Langston Hughes, Pedro Pietri and Miguel Pi ero, in their work make a connection between poetry, social criticism and the meaning of life together--that is a part of Recinos' own literary labor. His work creates a fusion between the personal and the public in verse that is searching, expansive and walking hurt streets. Cornered by the Dark is a work about truth-telling and witness-bearing to the marginal men, women and children who tell their story about a culture of indifference and callousness while finding courage and compassion to hope in everyday life. He uses the language of poetry in this collection to awaken the conscience to the world of social inequality, racism, xenophobia, poverty, and the pulse of existence in contexts beyond the dominant gaze of society.

Cornered by the Dark encourages readers to use their imagination to live into invisible communities and to pause in the places of difficult knowing where the voiceless speak. The unique contributions of this collection of poetry will be aided by Recinos' lived experience that empowers it: His life story began in the South Bronx. A tough place. A tormented place. His destitute Puerto Rican mother and Guatemalan father came to the United States motivated by their desperate flight from a life of misery and despair. They never lived the American Dream; instead, they remained economically marginal and cultural strangers in America. Sadly, their desperate conditions of life caused them to abandon Recinos to live on the streets. On the streets, he discovered a world of extreme poverty and drugs, until four years later when he was taken in by a White Presbyterian minister and his family. With this family, he began a drug-free life, went to the College of Wooster, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology with honors from The American University in Washington, D.C. Recinos' existential reality informs his poetic gaze.