Fighting Is Like a Wife
Eloisa Amezcua
Reviewed by Sylvia Foster
Eloisa Amezcua’s poetry collection Fighting Is Like a Wife is a textured retelling of the tragic marriage between boxer Bobby “Schoolboy” Chacon and Valorie Ginn. Amezcua’s research lends the collection a sense of devastating reality that is established from the very first poem, “Tale of the Tape.” Here, the poet lists stats for both Bobby and Valerie, placing Valorie in the division of “spouse,” while Bobby is in the “featherweight” division. This poem is bookended with the “date of birth” and “date of death” of each, leaving the reader to wonder what led Valorie to such an early grave, a question that the poet does not shy away from exploring.
Amezcua uses fighting, in its many forms, as the lens through which she views Chacon’s relationship with his wife and with the ring, using experimental shapes to reflect the push and pull of physical and emotional combat. The collection has an incredible topography, which visually indicates the emotional vortexes and moments of reflection that accompany such a consuming relationship. Amezcua accomplishes this through the clever manipulation of text, making the reading experience anything but orthodox. Many of the poems also employ a limited vocabulary, which emphasizes the exhaustion and repetition of arguments, both internal and external. These poems explore every iteration of a series of words, indicating how something as finite as word placement can have infinite repercussions. For example, “she thought no one loved / her she wanted me to sit / down & love her” eventually becomes “she loved no one & she / thought she wanted me / to sit down & love her.” These meditative techniques form a bond between reader and subject that persists long after putting the book down. In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Amezcua has crafted a finely-tuned recipe of intuitive formatting and poetic restriction, creating poems that beg to be read again, immediately.