In her second full-length collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua delivers a shockingly palpable recounting of the tragic relationship between boxer “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. The book shares its title with a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, which first highlights Chacon’s rise to fame and its effects on their marriage and then follows his decision to continue to fight following Valorie’s suicide. The poems in this book revisit this relationship, shifting in perspective to provide a balance between Chacon’s love of boxing, his love of Valerie, and Valerie’s love of Chacon. Amezcua’s simple diction renders the characters and situations relatable. To heighten the collection’s emotional impact, she employs visual techniques such as using texts that are inverted, reversed, fading, crossed-out, or blacked-out. Her ability to use structure and white space to concretize paradoxical sentiments is stunning. Amezcua’s endeavor to provide a sense of stasis to this famously complicated relationship is commendable and gorgeously crafted.
Through her adroit choices in form, Amezcua brings us directly into the ring and shines a chilling light on the parallels between love and fighting. The collection’s first poem, “Tale of the Tape,” is arranged in three columns that introduce us to the fighters via listing their dates of birth, stances, divisions, aliases, dates of death, and ages at the time of their deaths; next to “DIVISION,” Chacon is listed as “featherweight,” and Valorie is listed as “spouse,” and the stage is set. With fifteen poems in the collection being titled “ROUND 1” through “ROUND 15,” the arrangement of the collection follows that of a boxing match. There is also a series of twenty poems that share the title, “VALORIE,” each of them providing a sense of pathos for where Valorie feels emotionally as Bobby continues fighting. These poems are all written in third person and come out of the boxing ring to hold a space for Valorie’s feelings. The series utilizes double-spacing and caesura to pull the pace away from the rapidity of a prizefight to the creeping speed of emotional turmoil. For instance, in the “VALORIE” poem on page 23:
she wants to reachinside
herselfshe wants to swallow
herself whole
The “VALORIE” series carries us through the early stages of the marriage and unveils the worries and regret that Valorie must have faced; “must have” because in an interview with the podcast, The Write Question, Amezcua mentions, in all five years of her research for this project, that she “found three, maybe four direct quotes of hers [Valorie’s], and that was it. No video footage of her speaking. She had no opportunity to speak in the way that this story is portrayed in media of that time.” Of course, Chacon was given a massive amount of media space, and much of what the public came to know about the couple’s relationship is through what he said in interviews. Through this series we’re reminded that there is much more to this story than what we can find in magazine clippings and news reels. A pair of poems titled, “THE FACTS” are each structured as circles formed by a couple of repeated phrases. This emphasizes the circuity of trying to come to grips with difficult choices, while also mirroring a boxer circling around his competitor inside the ring. The second of the two poems spirals inward with a shrinking font, which seems to emphasize a hopelessness, a closing in, perhaps a dizziness from so many hits to the head—or perhaps the poem spirals outward with a growing font to emphasize how much more glaring and obvious the right decision can become as time moves on. Certainly, the poem is doing both. Perhaps, the most haunting aspects of this pair of poems are how their forms allow us to start or begin anywhere we wish (perhaps never stopping), and how the repeated statements so aptly apply to both Valorie and Bobby. Consider the language of the “THE FACTS” on page 30, “if things aren’t going right you have to face the facts why risk your life when things aren’t going right you have the rest of your life to live.” These phrases are vague and can be applied to anyone, but, in the midst of this collection, it’s inevitable that we affix them to Valorie and Chacon. The choice to repeat each phrase twice seems to emphasize how the sentiments of the poem can be applied to either character. Many of the poems in Fighting Is Like a Wife utilize varying dualities to accentuate tensions. Several poems appear in couplets, and one as a Venn Diagram. At the beginning of the collection there are times where the poem on the left-hand page is left-justified and the poem on the right-hand page is right justified, symbolizing two fighters in their corners. As the book moves on, there are times when that justification is reversed and brings the poems on each side toward the crease of the book, providing a sensation of conflict. A handful of poems appear in columns; “ROUND 11” does this with one column written in English and the other in Spanish. Near the collection’s end, the poems “MY WIFE DIED” and “BECAUSE I WOULDN’T QUIT” continue to exacerbate the book’s tension and underscore how Amezcua uses space and syntax to affect our emotions. These poems are also composed entirely in capital letters, causing them to feel loud and unavoidable, like Chacon’s emotions must have been. “MY WIFE DIED” consists of a prose block with the words “MY WIFE DIED BECAUSE I WOULDN’T QUIT” repeated for the full length of a page and ending on the words “I WOULDN’T,” which leaves us empathizing with some of the guilt Chacon must have faced, but by ending here after so many repetitions, Amezcua also reinforces that Bobby Chacon would not be quitting. During the lower two-thirds of the poem, a second prose block, comprised of the exact same words as the first, is layered on top of the first block, which doesn’t cause the texts to become indecipherable, but it does lead to the poem to overwhelm the page. The same effect is employed in “BECAUSE MY WIFE DIED,” except in this poem the text becomes white laid over a black background. While the shapes of the poems mirror each other, this shift in color articulates an obvious change from the previous poem and the appearance creates a darker tone before we even realize what Amezcua has done with a simple change in syntax. The second poem of the pair uses all the same words as the prior, only this time they’re delivered in a different order, “I WOULDN’T QUIT BECAUSE MY WIFE DIED.” How painful it is for both statements to be true. Amezcua ends the second poem’s repetition on “BECAUSE,” and we’re left to consider the implications of Chacon’s obsession and the narcissism involved in it. This level of syntactical mastery is a major component of what makes this collection so resonant. Each of the poems from the perspective of Chacon illustrate Amezcua’s incredible sense for arranging words. The book’s “NOTES” state, “All poems in the voice of Bobby Chacon are direct manipulations of quotes from the boxer taken from articles and interviews in both print and video.” It is a linguistic game of Tetris in how this poet is able to take a few words or phrases and arrange and rearrange them in such an emotionally affecting form. The poem, “PREDICTAMENT,” stresses the agitation Chacon publicly expresses going through over how his wife feels about his profession, and whether or not to continue fighting. The poem is crafted in two stanzas, the second being an inverse of the first and causing the poem to end with the same line it begins with, “I’ve done a lot of fighting.” That both stanzas grammatically make sense is an achievement. What takes the piece to another level is the repetition created in the middle and the way the poem foreshadows how Chacon won’t quit fighting despite his wife’s pleas, I hope she doesn’t
get mad at me
I know she won’t
/
I know she won’t
get mad at me
I hope she doesn’t
This rearranging to move, “I hope she doesn’t” to follow “get mad at me” moves us through the story and creates a turn that lets us know that not much is going to change regarding Chacon’s need and desire to continue boxing. In fact, so little changed that Chacon fought and won a boxing match the night after Valorie committed suicide and continued fighting for years to come. In the end, the same repetition that has developed as a hallmark of this collection imparts a relentless feeling of being hit again and again. The repetition is pummeling, like his career has been for Chacon, despite his successes. With “PUNCH-DRUNK,” Amezcua leaves us, where boxing leaves Chacon: The man can’t remember the date. How could we not feel badly for this man, despite how we’ve come to grieve for Valorie? We’re sad because he is a suffering human, and in spite of his flaws, Amezcua presents him as such. So much of the tragedy here rests in the fact that these two highly imperfect people did love each other, but love, too, is an imperfect thing. The tenderness with which this heartbreaking history is revealed through poems is a feat of profound empathy and compassion, one for which Amezcua should be proud. Fighting Is Like a Wife, by Eloisa Amezcua. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, April 2022. 88 pages. $16.95, paper. Josh Nicolaisen lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Sara, and their daughters, Grace and Azalea. He is a professional gardener and former high school teacher. He holds an MFA from Randolph College. Josh is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Clockhouse, So It Goes, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. Find him at oldmangardening.com/poetry. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
The man can’t remember his mother’s name.
The man can’t remember where he was when his wife shot herself in the head.
The man slurs his words.
The man’s lips tremble.
The man’s hands tremble.
The man trembles.
The man trembles.
The man trembles.
The man will die trembling.
Heavy Feather Review 
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