Canícula / Dog Days - by William Archila

About the Book

"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.

Book Synopsis

"In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival."--Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of East LA, Canícula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders.

William Archila's Canícula / 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 Latin Poetry. Canícula, 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.

"En esta brillante antología bilingüe, William Archila crea una poética poderosa y apasionada del exilio, la guerra y, en última instancia, la supervivencia."--Daniel Borzutzky, ganador del National Book Award

Desde el El Salvador devastado por la guerra hasta las calles del este de Los Ángeles, Canícula / Dog Days es una audaz colección bilingüe que narra el exilio, la memoria y la resiliencia a través de las fronteras.

Canícula / Dog Days de William Archila es una selección bilingüe de sus dos primeros libros de poesía, El arte del exilio y La arqueología del sepulturero, dos colecciones que marcan el surgimiento de un nuevo referente en la poesía latina. Dog days, que significa "canícula" en inglés, lleva al lector en un conmovedor viaje desde la agitación en El Salvador en la década de 1980 hasta el paisaje urbano del inmigrante en Estados Unidos, revelando la angustia y la memoria de los marginados, los empobrecidos y los desplazados que luchan por sobrevivir en sus hogares de Centroamérica. Con un lenguaje lírico y a menudo desgarrador, Archila desentierra los vestigios de la guerra y el regreso del exiliado en una elegía, los fragmentos de un mito o un riff de jazz. Se conjugan como la simetría bilateral de un volcán, y el resultado es la introducción a la poesía de Archila para el lector español.

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/Canícula 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

About the Author

William Archila, born in El Salvador, is the author of the most recent publications Canícula/Dog Days: Selected Poems 2009-2013 and S is For, winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger's Archaeology. He was awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and the anthology Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press. Born in El Salvador, he now lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.

Mario Zetino is a Salvadoran poet, translator, and scholar. He has published four poetry collections and has edited two anthologies of Salvadoran poetry. His most recent work is the collection Notas de un viaje humano [Notes on a human journey, 2024]. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, like Una madrugada del siglo XXI: Poesía joven salvadoreña (El Salvador), Colección de poesía (Miami), and Segundo índice antológico de la poesía salvadoreña (El Salvador). His work has been published in magazines like Cultura, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, La Zebra, El pez soluble, Álastor, and Latino Book Review. In 2016, he was a resident writer in the Hispanic Writers Week of UMass Boston. He has a degree in Spanish and carries on research on literary studies.