Book Review: S is For by William Archila
- Shade Literary Arts
- Sep 16
- 4 min read
William Archila
Black Lawrence Press, 2025
The day I write a book review for Salvadoran born poet William Archila’s third collection, S is For, from Black Lawrence Press, it is what would have been my abuelita’s 88th birthday, who passed in 2017. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, she migrated to rural Texas with my abuelito and they crafted a quiet life on the lonely plains – the same burial grounds of millions of bison murdered by settlers in the early 19th century. I don’t know if they dreamed of me becoming a poet, but they put me on a path to move between other worlds, to search for language that crosses between the living and the dead. It is no coincidence I found Archila’s newest collection of poems in our political landscape of genocide and jails, for he is a poet that can speak to specters, write a song, with a tongue that asks: “What else makes you disappear?”
S is For arrives when we most need a lyricism that not only witnesses but directly implicates US imperialism in Central America while also connecting and documenting a history of violence enforced inside the US. In the introduction to Archila’s first book, The Art of Exile, maestro Yusef Komunyakaa calls Archila, “a poet of the head and heart, of the personal and the public.” Following that lineage of the personal and the public from his previous collections, Archila’s poems have developed their own mythologies based on our harsh realities.
In the opening poem, “Beyond Bruegel’s Shore,” Archila drops his subject from the sky like Icaro, only from “Somewhere in Guatemala or Nicaragua,” the weight of wax wings too heavy to carry him any further. In reference to painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Archila’s poem redefines the classic myth that “he fell from the clouds // yet no one cared; not the hospitals // not the impoverished nor the imprisoned.” Instead, while the poem’s subject might have been banished from his former home, “today in Central America it does matter // another boy fell from the sky, chicken fluff & all // body tangled, indeed body tangled.” The tangled bodies of Archila’s poems shift from the geopolitical location of the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), where the poet writes, “I must tell you the truth. // Sometimes I want nothing more // than the continent capsized,” to the size of a country within a body.
Archila’s poems not only follow his subjects through perilous routes attempting escape from obstacles where, “S is for salt, for // spoiling crops. S // for worse or // no choice other // than exodus or // a territorial discourse,” while also encountering, “S for scalp, for the soiled // search of your god,” but Archila never leaves their side – not through dangerous crossing into the US, haunting of a land they are forced to flee, and certainly not in the lives they build in the mouth of the Empire.
The poet names the dead, massacres the survivors. In “El Mozote,” Archila’s lines sear and archive everything “in the clouds. Doroteo // Filomena, Facundo. Each name // a chamber, a chapel, fragment of a line // like an off-rhyme or a shotgun blast.” While these poems transfigure sorrow and rage, a reckoning occurs in Archila’s work. One of Archila’s final poems, “Spanish Lesson with a Handful of Dirt,” asks, “Did the Bible say don’t talk to the dead. // They are many & they want out. I think // 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.”
We hear ghosts of Milton, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, Roque Dalton, Ruben Dario, Shakespeare, and Miles Davis alongside the constant footsteps of migrants who have died, lived and experienced the atrocious conditions of mass migration created by the United States; but while these stories might take the lyrical forms of a sestina or ekphrastic, Archila’s syntactical choices refuse silence and instead, indict the Empire through rugged enjambments, nonlinear structure, and an unsettling present. Archila’s S is For offers us a collection of compelling poems so scorching that we too, risk plummeting from the sky like Icaro to follow along, just for a taste of the sun.
– mónica teresa ortiz, September 2025
MÓNICA TERESA ORTIZ is a poet and critic born, raised, and based in Texas. Their work has appeared in Protean, Poetry Daily, ANMLY, and Scalawag. Their poetry collection, Book of Provocations, was published in 2024 by Host Publications.
WILLIAM ARCHILA is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He 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, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Latino Poetry The library of America Anthology, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He is an associate editor of Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Ploughshares.
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