Fighting Is Like a Wife

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.

Publication date: April 12, 2022

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 7 x 9

Page count: 88 pages

ISBN: 9781566896344

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.

“Amezcua’s second collection probes notions of violence, sport, marriage and gender roles.”

—The New York Times

“In Amezcua’s work every possible choice available to a poet has been made with intention and expert execution.”

—Angie Dribben, The Los Angeles Review

“Formally agile poems appear alongside ones written in traditional forms. But even as I arrive at forms I know, Amezcua still keeps me on my toes as she bends and breaks the rules to suit the book’s needs.”

—Chet’la Sebree, Poetry Society of America

“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

“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

“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. 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