Description: "William Archila's Canicula/Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger's Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latine Poetry. Canicula, which means "dog days" in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile's return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila's poetry for the Spanish reader"-- Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes:
"In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival. To live in this work is to travel in the language of the Americas, its painful delirium. These poems, in both their English and translated forms, dig into the rancid holes that empire, dictatorship, and nation have left for us to crawl out of. Archilla, with honesty and artistry, asks us to see what it is to face destruction with a seething language that documents 'the grunt of flesh and bone, ' the disappearance of broken bodies, and the refusal to keep them in the realm of the invisible. And with much gratitude for the translator, Mario Zetino, and their contributions to the intertwined poetics of the diaspora."
-Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner
"With their gritty beauty, their somber hardness, their fealty to the truth, William Archila's poems have the force and conviction to linger long in the reader's mind... Dog Days/Caníiacute;cula presents us with a wealth of unforgettable poems about the duality of home for the immigrant poet, the one lost but still remembered from childhood with a mixture of longing and heartbreak, that 'tiny country' riddled with violence, versus the one gained, the East LA of his youth with its own glaring inequalities, through the trauma of assimilation that made Archila the poet that he is, a poet of unswerving conviction whose gift of empathy can make us feel to our core the suffering of 'neighbors, all soiled, / figures almost baked in clay, come back / from the greasy stacks of factories.' Mario Zetino should be applauded for imbuing his Spanish versions with a certain majesty that will surely impress those readers not just in El Salvador but also in the wider Spanish-speaking world."
--Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds
En esta brillante antología bilingüuuml;e, William Archila articula una poéeacute;tica intensa y poderosa del exilio, la guerra y, en úuacute;ltima instancia y de manera magistral, la supervivencia. Sumergirse en esta obra es viajar por el lenguaje de las Américas, por su doloroso delirio. Estos poemas, tanto en su versióoacute;n en inglés como en su traducción, ahondan en los agujeros podridos que el imperio, la dictadura y la nación nos han dejado para que intentemos salir de ellos. Archila, con honestidad y maestría, nos pide que veamos lo que significa enfrentar la destrucción con un lenguaje que hierve al documentar "un lamento de carne y hueso", la desaparición de cuerpos rotos y se rehúsa a mantenerlos en el reino de lo invisible. Agradezcamos muchísimo al traductor, Mario Zetino, por sus aportes al creciente tejido poético de la diáaacute;spora.
--Daniel Borzutzky, ganador del National Book Award
Con belleza descarnada, dureza sombría y fidelidad a la verdad, los poemas de William Archila tienen la fuerza y la convicción necesarias para quedarse por mucho tiempo en la mente del lector. En efecto, lo efímero no es el campo de este poeta, donde la agudeza ingeniosa suele ser la regla del juego. El poeta, nacido y por cierto tiempo criado en El Salvador, no rehúye transmitir los estragos de la guerra civil, pero al mismo tiempo da testimonio con un lenguaje sobrio impregnado de gracia de cómo los desposeídos (los lustrabotas, los niñntilde;os descalzos, los hombres con ropas desgarradas) luchan por sobrevivir. Rinde homenajes vívidos y tiernos, al evocar la influencia perdurable de aquellos grandes poetas --llamémoslos videntes-- como Neruda y Lorca, que le despertaron la devoción por el lenguaje y la tenacidad necesaria