S Is for - by William Archila (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

S is For is an investigation by poet William Archila of the Central American migrant crisis haunted by the past of the civil war in El Salvador, the meanings of family spirits, and trees disappearing to urban sprawl-- always wielding the voice of the immigrant, the refugee, and the ever-present exile as a weapon against invisibility and displacement.

Inventive and compassionate, Archila's poems navigate the meanings of family spirits, weeds and wildflowers, and the irreverence to lay down roots with our dead. The collection expresses the importance of an inner voice from the perspective of exile-- people with no country, no language, ghosts split between present and past, between home and foreign. In a variety of forms-- quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic, syllabic, lyric, memorial-- the poems create a bridge between flaws and fractures, between the northern region of Central America and the beloved north which is the US.

S is for: every letter never uttered, but evoked.

Review Quotes

William Archila's powerful poetry takes us out of our American comfort zone and situates us within the historical trauma of Central America. In a landscape haunted by violence and forced into silence, language is the best defiance to forgetting, breath punctuating the necessary truths "like an off-rhyme or a shotgun blast." Indeed, this book's s is for stunning. And startling. --Rigoberto González

Searing--not merely how I'd describe William Archila's gaze at the desperation and depredation attendant in power's abuse, the violence dogging the migrant, the slayings of those who stay. No, also, searing in the sense of that which burns a mark into a surface, how the poet's prosody scorches language into the line, into the throat, into the air. Heat, here, that makes light, signal visible even from exile, even to a distracted North who may not/may only notice that "Yesterday a cutthroat carved a copper/who carved a cutthroat, 224 wounds/for the smallest of spoils." Archila tallies these wounds and those that set fire to the heart. Here, S is for searing, for song, for sorrow. S is for sunlit, for shot, for shattered. S is for sublime. Stunning. Staggering. --Douglas Kearney

From El Salvador to Los Angeles, this deeply-moving book works to "occupy the dark" not with coercive force but through empathy, compassion, and witness. "Be mindful," "Take note," "Pay attention"--a powerful rhetoric of recognition courses through S is For, coupled with extraordinary lyric grace: "Lament/ happens so gradually/ no one ever notices the dust/ settling on the lemon trees." There's a lot of socially engaged poetry being written in America right now, and none of it is more powerful, purposeful, intimate or important than these poems by William Archila. --Campbell McGrath

About the Author

William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger's Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and Indiana Review.