Our first CHWP publication is a multimedia piece from Eloisa Amezcua, a poet whose work challenges our ideas about what a poem can do, can be. She’s interested in the sociocultural subtext in popular culture, and “Fighting Is Like a Wife”—drawn from her upcoming book by the same name, which portrays boxer Bobby Chacon and his wife, Valerie—speaks to the way that people on the socioeconomic margins are embedded in a multifaceted struggle to make space for themselves. What spoke to me about this piece in the current zeitgeist is that many of us who work in the arts know this need to push constantly for space and resources, and how that can erode one’s sense of mission and even self. Eloisa, as the director of Costura Creative, knows this aspect of the literary world all too well. Booksellers, freelancers, writers, agents—we all depend on book sales and arts funding, and we are all of us doing the work we love but also struggling to defend that work against the very real financial demands of daily life. —Erika Stevens, senior editor

Fighting Is Like a Wife

Click here for a PDF version with still images. 

About the author

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, Eloisa is the founder of Costura Creative and lives in Columbus, OH. Her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.