Fighting is Like a Wife

(Paperback)

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In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love storyand the tragedyof two-time world boxing champion Schoolboy Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn.

Bobby took to fighting the way a surfer takes to water: the waves and crests, the highs and the pummeling lows. Valorie, as girlfriend, then wife, then mother of their children, was proud of Bobby and how he found a way out of the harsh world they were born into. But the brain-sloshing blows, the women, and the alcohol began to take their toll, and soon Bobby couldnt hear her anymore. With her fate affixed to Bobbys, and Bobbys to the ring, Valorie sought her own way out of this dilemma.

Using haunting, visceral language to evoke the emotion of the fight, and incorporating direct quotations from sports commentators and Bobby himself, Fighting Is Like a Wife reveals how boxing, like love and poetry, can be brutal, vulnerable, and surprising.

Reviews

Through formally varied poems about the real-life featherweight boxer Bobby Chacon and his wife, Amezcuas second collection probes notions of violence, sport, marriage and gender roles. The New York Times

In Amezcuas work every possible choice available to a poet has been made with intention and expert execution. . . . This level of attention to the physicality of poetry allows form and placement to become part of the language or perhaps a language of its own. Angie Dribben, The Los Angeles Review

The vibrant second collection from Amezcua explores the life of world-boxing champion Bobby Chacon and his wife, Valerie Ginn. . . . Using redaction, repetition, and a dizzying variety of concrete poems that are like a literary magic-eye, Amezcua reveals new implications beneath the haunting text. Publishers Weekly

In these stunning poems, the ring is a space of corruption and redemption, brutality and tenderness, ambition and desperation. Eloisa Amezcua writes into the histories of the fighter Bobby Chacon and his wife, Valorie Ginn, with striking electricity and sensitivity, illuminating how the violent intertwining of two paths in the ring can have profound consequences for the lives lived outside it. Fighting Is Like a Wife is a tour de force, and Eloisa Amezcua is one of my favorite poets working today. Laura van den Berg

Eloisa Amezcuas gorgeous second collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, immerses us in the myriad trepidations and violences that orbit the fight game. These brilliantly tactile, visceral poems excavate the relentless combinations of jabs and apologies that come from men who only know how to talk with their hands. It takes a poet of exceptional empathy and uncanny dexterity to turn the difficult lives of Valorie Ginn and Bobby Chacon into verse as Amezcua has done. Beyond the rough history here is the poets perfect ear: we can hear the gloves when they land, we can hear two people tearing apart like a contract that shouldnt have been signed. The books title might be a quote from Chacon, but all the testimony inside is gifted to us by this marvelous poet. Adrian Matejka

Praise for From the Inside Quietly

A complex examination of how we come to love and how we come to be, the poems in From the Inside Quietly create an intricate and urgent music of the border and the feminine body. With a voice thats barbed at times but also full of empathy and grace, this is a powerful debut that will continue to rattle and quake in the mind. Ada Limn

In From the Inside Quietly, Eloisa Amezcua writes, in my own mind / Im a mirror. / I see everything / except myself. This book holds reflectionboth the noun and verb of itat its core, from the bottom of the pool / opal and shimmering to meditations on language, intimacy, and the self. These poems trouble themselves with what we know and what we dont: what a daughter knows of her mothers difficult childhood; what a psychiatrist knows of his patients that their own families dont know; what we know of our lovers; and what we know of ourselves. Despite all the tricks of light and shadow a mirror can play, all the tricks of distance and shape and proportion, in this stunning collection we encounter a poet who sees, feels, and writes with aching clarity. Maggie Smith

Eloisa Amezcuas From the Inside Quietly is a formally inventive book of lyric love poetry. But it is also a book about how love is a naturally clandestine thing. All yearning begins in a din of silence: Dragonflies hum over the lake / and the scalding dock / where you sit for hours, arms / tired from so much reaching. Amezcua is a poet who means to see what cant be said. This is a beautiful debut.Jericho Brown

Author Bio

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. She is the author of From the Inside Quietly (2018). A MacDowell fellow, Eloisa has published poems and translations in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere.