THE BOOKSHELF

Eloisa Amezcua’s Fighting is Like a Wife punches well above its weight class

BY ANNABELLA FARMER author@sfreporter.com

What do marriage and boxing have in common? A ring, maybe—and the ring is the boundary within which the tension and pull of Eloisa Amezcua’s new book of poetry, Fighting is Like a Wife (April 2022, Coffee House Press) takes place. Amezcua’s newest borrows its title from a 1983 Sports Illustrated article by Ralph Wiley, and it paints the history of two-time world boxing champion Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. It’s an aching book, one that parses the tangle of love and dependence that bound the two together until Ginn’s death by suicide in 1982.

Amezcua, who hails from Arizona, is a Macdowell fellow whose poems and translations have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review and Gulf Coast, among others. Fighting is Like A Wife is her second poetry collection, after 2018’s From the Inside Quietly. Her work is introspective and muted, even when its subject is violence, and her passages are a visual experience as much as an auditory or intellectual one; she experiments with the presentation of text on the page, playing with space and typography. The poems in Fighting Is Like a Wife are full of this kind of play: redactions, strikethrough, text that fades in and out of sight, text that blurs in double vision. Such devices lend her poetry a sense of dynamism, as if the pieces are in a perpetual state of flux and eternally revising themselves as the reader explores them. Amezcua draws on found text, too, using lines from sports commentary and interviews Chacon gave over the course of his career. All of the poems written in Chacon’s voice are composed from direct quotes Amezcua collected from articles and interviews. Fighting Is Like a Wife also owes much to other contemporary artists, borrowing from and building upon work by sociologist, poet and visual artist Eve L. Ewing; singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata; Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess and playwright Mona Mansour.

Found text morphs through phases of meaning, giving the reader the dizzying sensation of being inside the narrator’s head as their thoughts loop and weave, talking themselves into and out of action. In one poem entitled “The Money,” written in Chacon’s voice, Amezcua begins with the lines “I don’t care about the title / I’m in this for the money,” then revises that thought, ordering and reordering words and crossing them out until arriving at the conclusion: “I’m the money I care about in this.”

Fighting Is Like a Wife is experimental without feeling gimmicky and its narrative depth unfolds over the course of the

book in a way that goes beyond a love story. Amezcua inserts eerie, textured language against the backdrop of Chacon and Ginn’s situation. Chacon got into boxing because he needed the money, and the money kept him bound to the fight even as Ginn begged him to quit. The book plays along a fine line between capturing the reality and romanticizing its violence, but Amezcua’s dexterity lures the reader into the internal illogic of her subjects’ relationship in a way that evokes real empathy for each of them.

There is, however, an imbalance that must be acknowledged: Ginn’s character is omnipresent but less clearly defined than Chacon’s, maybe because she’s absent from much of the news coverage Amezcua employs. This creates a subtle power differential between the two characters. While Chacon speaks in his own voice, Amezcua creates Ginn’s character as a liquid, volatile presence, one that carries the strength of a sea but the malleability of water shaped by its vessel. The poems, too, are chaos in boundaries: The physical boundary of the ring is present in their structure, and the boundaries of the marriage seem inescapable yet fluid. “Bobby v Valorie,” for example, is constructed like a tensegrity model through which the reader follows threads of recombining narrative through a web of words, which seems as alive as a body moving in the ring.

It’s a choose-your-own-adventure format that leads the reader through iterations of story, only to arrive at the same inevitable end. We leave Chacon and Ginn at the moments their lives end. Ginn died by suicide at the age of 31: “& poof / there there / on her bedroom floor / the / world scatters.”

Chacon, meanwhile, developed dementia as a result of repetitive brain injuries over the course of his career and died at 64: “The man will die trembling.”

And thus, Amezcua leaves us with one last punch in the gut.