S is For

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