Fighting is Like a Wife Paperback – April 12, 2022 by Eloisa Amezcua (Author)
$16.95

Fighting Is Like a Wife

Brand: Coffee House Press
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Authors: Eloisa Amezcua
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Coffee House Press (April 12, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1566896347
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1566896344
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.9 x 0.3 x 8.9 inches

 

In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love story—and the tragedy—of 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 couldn’t hear her anymore. With her fate affixed to Bobby’s, and Bobby’s 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.

 

Review


“Eloisa Amezcua’s 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 poet’s perfect ear: we can hear the gloves when they land, we can hear two people tearing apart like a contract that shouldn’t have been signed. The book’s title might be a quote from Chacon, but all the testimony inside is gifted to us by this marvelous poet.” —Adrian Matejka

About the Author

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. She is the author of From the Inside Quietly (2018). A MacDowell fellow, her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Eloisa is the founder of Costura Creative. Her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, will be published by Coffee House Press in 2022.