Book by Eloisa Amezcua Review by Angie Dribben

Fighting Is Like A Wife

By Eloisa Amezcua

Coffeehouse Press

Release Date: April 2022

ISBN 978-1-56689-642-8

$16.95  

88pgs

Ring Intimates 

Review by Angie Dribben

Eloisa Amezcua’s Fighting Is Like a Wife records a poet’s successful reckoning with the emotional and physical matters of poetry ultimately offering an intense level of intimacy with the story of two-time world boxing champion Bobby “Schoolboy” Chacon and his first wife Valorie Ginn. It vibrates with the tension of two fighters in a ring. Sometimes the fighters are Bobby and his ring opponent, others it is Bobby and Valorie. Still more intriguing is when the spouses’ inner turmoil becomes the main event. As invigorating as all of this is, what engaged me the most was the sense that the poet herself is sparring with the parameters of poetry. I kept hearing CD Wright’s poetics “Nothing is arbitrary;” and in Amezcua’s work every possible choice available to a poet has been made with intention and expert execution. Eloisa Amezcua’s Fighting Is Like A Wife is empowered and propelled by three strong scaffolds: a consistent duality, visual poetry, and voice.

Immediately, the very first poem, a triptych, names Bobby Chacon and Valorie Ginn contenders, setting up one of the many ways the collection investigates conflict. Three columns: one for Bobby and one for Valorie with the middle column naming their stances respectively: division—featherweight and spouse; alias—schoolboy and Val; date of death—ages 64 and 31. The poet has set the task for herself to bear witness to this marriage, this ultimate ring battle, and maybe the early death of Valorie.

Duality exists on multiple planes all of them steeped in a fight. The fighting itself is at work within Bobby and Valorie, between Bobby and Valorie, within the ring, between the ring and the unmet expectations of a spouse: “the move north to the country /… fresh air [Bobby] promised.” It is in surviving the world outside of the home, within the home, and the tension existing within the attempt to survive the two. 

This poet is always aware of their responsibility to tend to the metaphor of the fight—to parry and shift as well as the necessity of making every thrown word land and stick. If I consider the quickness of a boxing match, rapidity of blows, of the 3-minute round itself, I recognize the intentional duplication of the fight tempo in the spareness of the verse. 

Eloisa Amezcua’s Fighting Is Like a Wife is an education on visual poetry. Redactions. Erasures. Venn Diagrams. Arrangement. A slip of lines to the right margin. A careful fade. I imagine Amezcua with a box of words and a blank page. In my mind she arranged and rearranged these words a thousand times. She dimmed some, darkened others. Moved them to the top right corner, the bottom left. She laid them horizontally and then arranged them in columns of threes. It is this careful precise placement of every single word that arranges each poem to its greatest effect. 

In Valorie, the first line of the couplets is traditional while the second line in each is upside down and lightened. A reflection. Duality lives on within the visual element.

This level of attention to the physicality of poetry allows form and placement to become part of the language or perhaps a language of its own. So many of the poems I don’t find myself engaging as a reader, rather I view it as I would an exhibit, a picture in a gallery. I turn my head. I turn it the other way. I observe the shading or bolding, the choices of boundaries or not. I experience it viscerally through image rather than the text itself. I become as intimate with its every shape as I would a lover.

The voices in this collection also work as one of the scaffolds. This is not written all in the poet’s voice, in Bobby Chacon’s or in his wife Valorie’s. In fact, it sometimes feels like it is poetry itself talking or the fight itself—the ring, the gloves, the contact between fist and face, between two hearts, between word and page. 

Amezcua steps aside and allows Bobby, Valorie, the love and the fight to tell their own stories demonstrating an awareness of agency. In addition, this domain over one’s own voice draws me deeper into familiarity with each character. I am looking through everyone’s individual lens, including the poet’s. When it’s Bobby speaking the lines are taken from quotes in his interviews. If the poem is observing Bobby, the poet uses second person. 

Repetition seems to be most commonly used for Bobby poems and the lyricism for the Valorie poems as if to replicate her femininity. In Trouble, we become acquainted with Bobby’s mental haunts through repetition and lines of brevity, “I was always / in trouble / …most likely to get / into trouble / … / & in trouble / with the police / & you’re most likely / to get into trouble / with the police / & you’re most likely / to get into trouble / … / & the running / into trouble & / … / & I was in / trouble always”. 

While in a Valorie poem, musicality pulsates: 

………………….“the stars &………..nothing more ………..no / everything………..unknown

………………….is ………………….the sky/…………………. swallowed ……………whole.”

All three elements—duality, visual poetics, and voice—operate with purpose and presence at all times.  They work to root readers into relationship with Bobby, Valorie, Amezcua, and our own manifestations or denials of intimacy. My personal poetics underwent a transformation as I traversed Fighting Is Like a Wife. I feel that much more accountable for every choice I make in a poem. Or for recognizing every choice there is to make. I feel challenged to leave no choice on the table unconsidered. To push the possibilities of page and line and letter. 

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press (April 2022). Amezcua’s debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, (Shelterbelt Press, 2018). She’s received fellowships & scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Workshop, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, & the NY State Summer Writers Institute. Eloisa is the Associate Director of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America & serves on the faculty of Randolph College’s Low Residency MFA program. 

Angie Dribben’s debut collection, Everygirl, was a finalist for the 2020 Broadkill Review Dogfish Head Prize. She was a poetry contributor at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and holds an MFA from Randolph College. Her most recent work can be found in Orion, Coffin Bell, Split Rock Review, The Night Heron Barks, Cave Wall, EcoTheo, Big City Lit, and others.

4 May 2022