2010 International Latino Book Award - Poetry
Part of the Canto Cosas series
In The Art of Exile, William Archila asks readers in the United States to engage with a subject seldom explored in American poetry: the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s and its impact on Central American immigrants who now claim this country as home. In language that is poignant and often harrowing, the poet takes us on a journey from Santa Ana, El Salvador, to Los Angeles, California. Archila bridges race and class, metaphor and reality with astuteness, mingling humor and pain with a skill that denigrates neither.
"A poet of the heart and head, of the personal and public, at times William Archila's poignant poems make me hear and feel an echo of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo." —From the introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner
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About Canto Cosas
Funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, this series is designed to give further exposure to poets who have achieved a significant level of critical recognition through individual chapbooks and publication in periodicals or anthologies or both, but who have not yet had their own books of poetry published. Under the watchful eye of series editor and award-winning poet Francisco Aragón, the books in Canto Cosas alternate between the experimental and the traditional. There are no necessary restrictions on ethnicity, nationality, philosophy, ideology, or language; we will simply continue our commitment to producing high-quality poetry. Our goal is to make the work of these poets accessible to a wider readership of critics and poetry buffs alike.
