Children in the Underworld

Evangeline Riddiford Graham reviews William Archila’s collection “S Is For.”

By Evangeline Riddiford GrahamMarch 9, 2025

• Poetry

ODYSSEUS CANNOT HUG his dead mother. When he meets her in Homer’s underworld, she dissolves in his arms, “wavering like a dream.” The hero of the Odyssey suspects more foul play on the part of the gods, but his mother gently explains (in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation):

All mortals meet this judgment when they die.
No flesh and bone are here, none bound by sinew,
since the bright-hearted pyre consumed them down—
the white bones long exanimate—to ash;
dreamlike the soul flies, insubstantial.

Reaching the kingdom of the dead, the psychoanalyst James Hillman has argued, demands not just a subterranean journey but also an interior one. Where Odysseus must sail beyond the light of the sun, the rest of us make the journey in our nightmares. The underworld occupies our sleeping mind: it is the place where our contradictions walk freely in perpetual anti-reality.

We know we are entering the underworld in William Archila’s new poetry collection S Is For because the road markers all point downward. In the second line of his untitled opening poem, Archila warns us, “The life of a minor always leads to a line of corpses”; by the next poem, a boy has fallen from the sky in Central America, and dies unseen (though we should treat the narrator’s insistence that “there was no one around” with caution). We are entering a terrain dominated by the dead, and none of the metrics of the living can be trusted. “No maps nor numbers,” Archila writes, not the “ghost of God” that is the government. And in this modern underworld, mothers and comrades in arms are not reanimated to offer sound advice. If we are looking for a guide, we should try the coroner’s logbook.

The tragedy of S Is For is that the subjects of Archila’s kingdom of the dead are still alive, and desperately trying to stay that way. Their journey through death is that of the hundreds of thousands of people from Central America’s Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—who travel 3,000 extremely perilous miles in an attempt to enter the United States by crossing the country’s southern border with Mexico.

Around 2014 or 2016, Archila, who teaches in Los Angeles, started encountering more and more Central American students in his classroom who had crossed the border as unaccompanied minors. “By the time they get to the classroom, when they get to the US,” Archila told me in a conversation in 2022, “their anxiety and mood disorders can be debilitating, which is one of the reasons why the kids were dropping out of high school and developing a lot of mental illness. […] It just was relentless.”

Archila, who was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1980, was struck by the ways that conditions had changed for Central American migrants since the Cold War. Then, Central Americans coming to the United States had some education, he remembers, and their pathways to entry were split between Los Angeles and Florida—“depending how much money you had.” The children now entering his classroom had grown up in the shadow of civil war. Their parents had died, or fled, or disappeared. They had almost no education. They were fleeing persecution by gangs and drug cartels as well as violent crime and poverty. And they were leaving their countries on their own—some at just 10 years old. In fiscal year 2014, US Customs and Border Protection reported the apprehension of 68,541 unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border (a 77 percent jump over the previous year); 51,705 of those children were from the Northern Triangle.

Meanwhile, the reception in the United States had changed too. By 2017, the first Trump administration had begun detaining and issuing criminal charges against anyone found to be crossing the border illegally, a policy that separated 3,913 children from their families. (In a knife twist of timing, Archila’s new book has been published in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, during which time the president lifted regulations on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, froze asylum applications at the southern border, and signed 10 executive orders targeting immigration, including an order that would end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States.)

In his classroom, Archila noticed the way his students transformed when they opened up to him about their experiences—their eyes and body language would shift, their expressions growing darker. He also observed that they found it difficult to share their stories; they didn’t seem to think their experiences mattered. He saw it differently. In S Is For, he recognizes the journey of Central American migrants as one of Homeric scope: a confrontation with such obstacles as can only be overcome by a hero and are, conversely, the making of him. Such adversity, Archila writes, is “the brilliant genesis of Odysseus.” In their border crossings, the same ones from which they know their fathers will never return, Central American boys rely on their legs and their wits, earning the epithet by which Odysseus alone is addressed in the Homeric epics: “πολῠμήχᾰνος” (polŭmḗkhănos). Resourceful.

The poems in the new collection, Archila’s third, are grouped by thematic concerns that trace a lost-and-found story: the crossing, the home left behind, family, the lasting nature of invisibility. This is an epic that is nonlinear, indirect, and recursive; it is a journey haunted by those who have already undertaken it, who find themselves ever departing, ever partly dying, ever walking the same trail. The destination is not a house with a backyard and shelves in the pantry but the headspace of a man who installs his shelves, in his pantry, in his home, then goes outside for a smoke and, standing there in the night air, thinks:

[S]omething must be done
about the loneliness it takes
to imagine the dead.

He is not a man howling at the moon; he is a man with a casket for a chest. A book and a lifetime later, he still can’t find a witness to make the heaviness of his memories meaningful: “No one / walking the streets is here to see it.” Even the word dead is deadweight, jokes the speaker—the very language he might use to talk about the past is burdensome and valueless. This is a peculiar humiliation for a pallbearer: to be overtaxed while at the same time bearing nothing of substance—certainly nothing that anyone else sees, or chooses to see. So dismissed, thoughts themselves are effectively killed off.

As the classicist D. S. Carne-Ross has pointed out, Homer’s Odysseus is able to travel through the land of the dead without experiencing a death himself; indeed, he is something of a tourist among the shades, collecting gossip, soliciting advice, slowing the progress of dead queens so he can admire their virtues one by one. When he speaks with his dead mother, Odysseus airs his worries and receives reassurance. Yes, the rowdy suitors back in Ithaca are cause for concern, but his wife is faithful and his son good. Goddesses and princesses have already supplied him with shelter, clothes, food, wine, sex. Now, for his final bit of rehabilitation, the middle-aged sailor converses with interlocutors Homer repeatedly characterizes as “dreams” and “phantoms”—that is, the stuff of thought. The hero checks in with himself.

In Archila’s odyssey, there is water to cross. Families are divided. A journey that is an easy charter for others is made nearly impossible for our protagonist, for reasons that boil down to the modern equivalent of the interpersonal wranglings of the gods: geopolitics. But this new epic takes place on a tilted stage. The stowaways in the land of the dead are children, each an underequipped Icarus with “chicken fluff” for wings. They cannot travel home from war (home is war), so they seek an unknown “heaven.” Arriving, they may find themselves restricted to a state of perpetual disappearance: running from law enforcement, or “taking care of other people’s babies. […] Wiping. Mopping.” Incarcerated. Deported.

Homer’s underworld is past the edge of the map and beyond the reach of the sun; Odysseus and his men are seasoned sailors by the time they reach the gloom of “the world’s end.” By contrast, as Archila underscores in the poem “Our Mouths, Laurels & Lilies,” the Central American boys of S Is For start out already familiar with “the periphery of the earth.” At the grave’s edge, they have seen the corpses of friends and relatives and acquaintances—murdered at random or for “the smallest of spoils”—transfigured into rocks and flowers. Odysseus’s quest, Carne-Ross points out, is a fundamentally domestic one, a restoration not to life itself but to the niceties of living: silver finger bowls, roast dinners, family. But when Archila’s Central American boys set out walking, they do so with the knowledge that they could just as easily be dead already.

Indeed, to walk as discreetly as the dreamlike dead—“impalpable,” in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Homer—is imperative when you are evading human traffickers, cartels, assault by other travelers, and border police. Archila’s boys are “pale ghosts.” They move feather-light, carrying nothing with them and making no sound when they fall. The sustained silence of S Is For becomes almost hallucinogenic; the walkers dissociate, their minds untethering and “falling behind” while their bodies endure hardships past reason. “How small the countries of our bodies,” they observe, as if from on high.

In their floating detachment, Archila’s boys bump up against a space where God should be and find an absence. But the revelation that God might be “wicked”—or, more disturbing yet, “askew”—is not an idea that lights the way forward through a landscape of bones and “tooth-shaped mountains.” Instead, like the hellfire of Paradise Lost, that spark of thought only makes, as Milton has it, “darkness visible.”

For Milton’s damned, being able to see one’s fate is punishment in itself. For Archila’s protagonists, adjusted to near-complete sublimation, the jolt of self-consciousness—of recognizing one’s own mind at work—is extremely frightening. The “lucid thought” that one of Archila’s narrators discards in a back alley threatens the self-denial that is critical to his ability to travel unnoticed, not speaking, not seen:

The roof of your mouth ossified,
tongue only the space it used
to take. At ease with the dark.
At ease with your reflection
blurred in public restrooms.

Maintaining darkness—inward and outward—is the only way to keep moving, concludes a narrator in Archila’s eight-part polyvocal poem “Northern Triangle Dissected,” a keystone of the collection. Casting aside those flickering thoughts allows a mind “to obliterate one’s country.” In other words, to forget.

“In Freud’s view,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, “we have conscience so that we may not perish of the truth—the truth, that is, of our desire.” Knowledge of one’s homesickness, one’s inmost wish to turn back, for instance, can be subdued and concealed by the loud regulatory voice of conscience, which commands a person to stick to predetermined principles: Keep walking. Be silent. This self-intimidation is a survival tactic, but the betrayal it demands is another reason the flares of unruly thinking in S Is For feel so precipitous. Each thought extinguished is a little soul quashed—“as if the doctor has cut a wedge / out of the brain,” Archila writes. By the final section of “Northern Triangle Dissected,” conscience has won out. Leave the “tangled hills” of your mind, it insists, and walk—if not on your feet, then on all fours.

On such a hazardous descent, poetry can offer unique protection. In the tradition of Dante and Virgil (both are mentioned in S Is For, as is Milton), Archila hides us from the surveillance of conscience, allowing our safe passage into the realm of death, dreams, and desires. When we arrive at that deepest, innermost place, in “Double,” the final poem of the collection, we find a loss of shattering simplicity: “There used to be,” Archila writes, “a Salvadorean / boy inside this body.”

If the opening section of S Is For recreates the psychological process that violently jettisons the child within, the passages that follow perform a kind of talk therapy, in which Archila encourages his narrator’s mind to roam over his interior experience. The poet is an inventive analyst. With hypnotic rhythm and a nearly compulsive repetition that reaches its apogee in a time-bending sestina, Archila traces images of lost childhood: a mother flinging her bridal sheets over a clothesline; aunties, accessorized with the handkerchiefs of another era, flapping their arms at children to eat. These memories are complicated by later iterations in a razed landscape. An elderly aunt is trapped in a circular monologue, too pious to openly mourn an old paramour and unable to acknowledge that, in the violence-stricken country she left behind, “young marrieds in their newly home mean nothing.” A grandfather who distills the legacy of a banana republic in his “Robert Mitchum pompadour” dies with a bottle in his pocket, one of many drunks who “didn’t matter / to the nation, though they were the nation.” With the dazzling efficacy of stream of consciousness, the narrator looks at his grandfather’s “rotgut” cadaver and observes a century of US commercial interests exploiting, occupying, and deserting the Northern Triangle. If Archila’s migrants find themselves endlessly rewalking the trail, a death drive that regresses toward the part of themselves they lost en route, the United States’ own willingness to repeat the cycle of economic and political interference that fosters the conditions of mass migration (the United Fruit monopoly, the Contras wars, the for-profit cities owned by foreign investors) suggests an urge to recreate a pre-postcolonial Central America.

The poet-analyst can disrupt the patterns of trauma by offering new avenues for talking about it. In James Hillman’s succinct tangram: “Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity.” S Is For collapses these two languages of analysis and releases their stuttering revelations (darkness, light, father, mother, mountain, death) through that third mode: verse.

The publisher page for S Is For notes that the new collection boasts a variety of forms (“quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic, syllabic, lyric, memorial”). Though of course that’s true, this makes it sound a little like Archila is squeezing a crisis through an acrostic. But the poet is not playing. In “Saturn’s Country,” the sibilance of “S is for” turns out to be the sound of a state devouring its young—the hiss of silencing. In “Dear Republic,” when the speaker sets out to challenge the state in direct address, his charge of culpability disintegrates into uncertainty. How can four tidy quatrains broach a question of such monumental scale and ruinous intimacy? By the final lines, his syntax has started eating itself:

Who are they, in their elegant decay, the marble souls of their children
bothered by my presence, in their perfect pitch & breed, still hungry?

Archila uses the strictures of form—forced enjambement, meter, the madness of rhyme and teetering near-rhyme—to unsteadying effect. The speaker of “Dear Republic,” aware that he might “fail miserably” in his attempt to provide a coherent counternarrative of invisibility, deviates in an unexpectedly metatextual confession: “Sometimes I feel haunted by the very / margins of my story.” The arbitrary confines of the poem have pushed his conscience (“I want to tell you every argument”) to collapse into his innermost desire (“my boy’s umbilical cord”). Through form, Archila bends further the contortions of personhood until they are made ridiculous, and the speaker can be released into the true entanglements of his experience, in which grief, death, love, and folly intermingle. Poem to poem, line to line, a reader doesn’t know what will come next. Archila’s speaker doesn’t seem to know either. “Sometimes,” he admits,

I just want to find a blue t-shirt that says
Salvadorean lost in space, but all they have is this
feathered hat, Chesterfield jacket that ought to be shelved
in the attic.

Archila’s excellent previous collection, The Gravedigger’s Archaeology (2015), excavated El Salvador’s civil war. It is a book sensitive to detail, and its still lifes of the time and place are sketched closely, giving its pages the glinting quality of fable.

In S Is For, Archila has written something messier, not a fable but a myth. It is a book for the present, for these years when that small collective flame of resistance has been reduced to an isolated flickering, when God is godless and a state of permanent invisibility has extended to the living. In a perversion of poetry of witness, Archila dispenses with conscience and turns out the lights. “Only the dark knows / you exist,” he writes. The poet might be addressing a migrant huddled, unseen, on a doorstep; he might be speaking to the ghost boy buried in a grown man’s chest.

We have gone beyond facts. There is no single speaker, and the utterances of coyotes, teenagers, border guards, and adult poets blur in unsettling ways. No wonder Archila has chosen film noir—that cinema of unease, complicity, and ineradicable sleaze—as the Hollywood genre to depict the Central American migrant after-afterlife in Los Angeles. Here, ghosts and cops and taco trucks intermingle. If the city has a conscience, it’s a fog that descends to lock gates and turn out lights (though it manages to overlook the sprinklers flooding desert lawns viridian green). And what of the legally invisible underclass of undocumented workers just outside the frame of the B-movie shot of a glowing boulevard hotel bar? “Don’t ask.”