Mass detention and deportation forces many to leave the country they call home to return to the country the government designates as their home. William Archila’s timely book of poems provides much-needed sociopolitical introspection and asks what it means to be “Of a country & without a country.” Archila, who lives in a permanent state of exile, uses his poetry to wander a cosmic plane, sometimes in the sky or in a Spanish love song, other times in a city of ghosts or in a migrant’s knapsack.
To fully appreciate Archila’s work, one should know a bit about El Salvador and its relationship to the U.S. Donald Trump has recently accused El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, of “dumping” his country’s criminals into the U.S. While it’s true that a large percentage of people crossing the border are from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), many of the people coming from this region are families like Archila’s seeking refuge and improved quality of life. The pattern of fleeing El Salvador didn’t begin overnight; it stems from decades of political instability and civil turmoil. The Salvadoran Civil War was a twelve-year conflict that took place from 1979 to 1992, with robust U.S. involvement from the start. Archila and his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1980, shortly after the war began. Now, forty-five years later, Archila writes toward understanding the spiritual and psychological ramifications of this migration.
Archila’s eloquent verse explores loss both of loved ones and of his home country. In the poem “Spanish Lesson with a Handful of Dirt,” Archila opens with a quote from Ruben Blades: “Todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron,” which can be translated to “everyone returns to the land where they were born.” Archila writes:
my father said it best when he told me
you don’t have to teach the dead to talk.
They know what to say. They say spring.
They say summer leaves & a handful of dirt.
They might disappear, go back to wherever
they came from, just when you realize
you’re accustomed to their sounds.
In this poem and throughout the collection, there’s a sense of mourning as the speaker embarks on a journey through grief. Death is handled with care in these lines as the speaker turns to their elders, invokes their ancestors, connects with the earth, and alludes to a spirit realm. I interpret the relationship of the Blades quote and the poem in two ways. The quote can be seen as a way to suggest that a person’s home country lives permanently in their families, ancestors, language, and, more implied, in their hearts. The quote can also be seen as a meditation on death suggesting that the dead return home upon passing, which is supported by the lines in the poem “[the dead] go back to wherever / they came from.”
In the poem “Northern Triangle Dissected,” Archila unpacks a litany of corruption through a frustrated speaker:
Illegitimate
country of legs & arms
in a way a rosary I have
nothing to say, nothing
to add, except I’m ashamed
I lost it. Country of piece-
of-shit Coca-Cola, torso
& head, I piece you
like a forsaken blanket
over the shoulder, how
does one forget such
weight, how does leaving
mean much more than
returning.
In this eighth and final numbered section of the poem, Archila—in a pattern that appears throughout the poem—juxtaposes religious imagery with contemporary challenges faced in Central America. El Salvador has a long relationship with Coca-Cola. It’s no secret that the soda company pumps millions of marketing dollars into Latin American countries, and in many areas, soda has become cheaper and more accessible than water. In El Salvador, they load up school buses for factory tours to indoctrinate the youth. Worst of all, their sugar supplier has been accused of child abuse and child labor in the sugar cane fields. The “weight” of this is something the speaker carries with them even after leaving the country. The speaker has a kind of permanent empathy for their country, as if the country itself is stitched into a “forsaken blanket” and thrown “over [their] shoulder.” The use of religious imagery in the poem—a rosary, heaven, and Eden—creates a sense of loss, and a feeling that something is both there and not there. El Salvador, to the speaker, is distant in physical proximity and yet it’s close to the heart, much like the way heaven, to a religious person, might feel like some far-off place they read about, yet they feel a closeness to it, as if they will one day return home.
There is an ethereal quality to the poems in this collection. The reader floats between earth and sky, between present experience and memory, either personal or historical. In the poem “El Mozote,” which is inspired by the memorial for the massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador, Archila weaves in names of the dead with ominous nature imagery:
The morning the deer roamed
the thick of the woods, panels
of the sky capsized; the stare innocent
the cut unclean. The bar, the stem
the height. Cayetano, Candelaria
Concepcion built like a house.
As the speaker contemplates the massacre through the lens of the monument, the materiality of the memorial takes on a life of its own. Surrounded by roaming deer and thick woods, the panels in the monument—which are black outlines of two adults and two children holding hands—are described as capsized fragments of the sky. Capsizing is a failure to stay afloat, a failure to function as intended, and, given the religious overtone throughout the book, “the sky capsized” reads as a failure of nature or of God. In other words, the massacre is a tragedy of biblical proportion. Persisting with the ominous sky imagery, Archila—as if to say God is watching, or perhaps to say that nature has its own memory—tells us later in the poem that “everything / is archived in the clouds.” As the speaker continues to meditate on the monument, we see the names “built like a house,” a simile which allows the memory of the dead to live in a way that the innocent people who were massacred were unable to.
Amid the horrors highlighted by Archila, the poems bend toward beauty, particularly in the second half of the collection. In the poem “Las Tías,” the speaker shows appreciation for family:
They get together in the evenings
for coffee & pan dulce
when the weather is cool
and the white handkerchief out
for a sniff is a sign of colonial
elegance. They talk
in a tone of hamacas
in a hospice, medieval cathedral
in the form of a son
who can no longer reinvent
the sign of the cross.
Through food imagery, Archila tethers the reader to the nurturing qualities of large, Latin American families. The aunts gather around warm food and drink, despite the cool weather. Their speaking tone is that of hammocks in a hospice, which is to say comforting despite the circumstances. The son who can no longer reinvent the sign of the cross appears as a medieval cathedral; a living reminder that their family will persevere, that life goes on beyond the atrocities. The son as a medieval cathedral is also another way of saying he is the house of God. In other words, children are sacred, they are the embodiment of hope.
To use language from the collection, S is for songs, for streets, for stained fingers on her apron, for Spanish lesson with a handful of dirt, for Salvadorean lost in space, for Salvadorean boy inside this body, for sad steps to heaven. For me, after reading this collection, S is for sincere, stunning poetry. Archila captures a wide range of emotions, a range that is representative of the human experience. Tragedy meets hope, isolation meets family, and lamenting meets love in this expansive collection.
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S Is For. By William Archila. Mount Vernon, NY: Black Lawrence Press, 2025. 110 pp. $19.95.
