On the Sight of Angels

by Harold J. Recinos

Publisher:

Resource Publications

, 2025

Overview

On the Sight of Angels is poetry that makes the American context the focus of thinking, imagination, and observation to cast a light on experiences of exclusion and belonging. The poetry in this collection is presented as a mode of knowing knotted with a larger world of human experiences, giving voice to both social divisions and new possibilities of life together. Poetry carries the reader beyond intellectual meaning into the terrain of emotional, imaginative, and experiential meaning that provides ways to envision and distinctively understand the world. In part, this collection of poetry is a way to articulate the sacred, pose new questions about God in human experience, and explore issues of society that request its continuous undoing and remaking. In a time of diminished concern for justice and equality, the poems in this collection offer readers a way to reimagine an ethic focused on a solidarity of difference. In this collection, poems show the facts of everyday life may be invested with a meaning that is capable of inspiring people to bend social reality in the direction of the justice needed to repair the common good.

Praise for On the Sight of Angels

“From its early invitation to ‘step into this / place where God is never / indifferent to the movement / of life’ through its later invitation to ‘look / for the corners visited by / radiant goodness,’ On the Sight of Angels proves that Harold Recinos is alert to the messengers of God, and also ‘unafraid to gather whatever / glitters in a world in need of / repair.’”

—HL Hix, Professor for the Department of Philosophy and the Creative Writing Program, University of Wyoming



“With incisive and prophetic prose, Harold Recinos uncovers the social maladies that meter alone cannot measure. His poetics accentuate lived life by evoking the undecidable syllables of pain, hopelessness, despair, and abandonment, while unearthing the rhythms of injustice, racism, and marginalization. Embodying the identifiably struggles of Latinas/os, Recinos’s dexterous imagination paints for us a glimpse into the stubborn determination of this people to continue living in spite of divinely censured incalculable social and cultural forces of dehumanization.”

—Nestor Medina, Associate Professor of Religious Ethics and Culture, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto



“Of the many important things these deeply felt poems accomplish—perhaps the most essential—is the view of White America they offer: the other side of America that’s seldom seen with such bravado and honesty in American poetry; an immigrant Black and Brown America ripped open by White rage and indifference. Recinos’s view of the role Christianity plays in all of this is equally profound and original. These are poems that needed to be written, truthful, often enraged, poems written by and for the soul. Amen.

—Philip Schultz, Founder, The Writers’ Studio



“In Harold Recinos’s luminous new book, On the Sight of Angels, the poignant features of everyday life serve as the ethical and aesthetic focus of his poetry. Recinos gleans love and meaning from the systematic fraying of experience. Chronicling the burdens of existence, each poem reflects on a tenacious will to life where connection and communion mitigate the vampiric violence of capitalism. What we experience as readers is the sheer brilliance of a poet committed to the vitality of ordinary existence, to the divinity of marginalized subjects, and to a revolutionary perseverance that brings light to the world.”

—Richard Perez, Director of U.S. Latinx Literature Minor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York



“To read Harold J. Recinos’s On the Sight of Angels is to commit to listening deeply, openly, without shield or judgement. Each poem is an invitation to let go of the cacophony that surrounds us and listen to the heartbeat of those whose stories weave in and out of these pages; an invitation to let each story broaden our understanding of communion and acceptance. With the turn of the last page, I am reminded of how to live with others—not against each other.”

—Claudia Aburto Guzmán, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Bates College

Product Details

• Title: On the Sight of Angels
• Author: Harold J. Recinos
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Print Publication Date: 2025
• Logos Release Date: 2025
• Pages: 164
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9798385231379, 9798385231355, 9798385231362
• Resource ID: LLS:9798385231379
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-16T20:42:38Z