Description

CoffeeHouse Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing:Boxing, like love, is about vulnerability. Its about standing in front of someone knowing you will hurt each other and trying to make it out alive.

InFighting Is Like a Wife,Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love storyand the tragedyof two-time world boxing champion Bobby Schoolboy Chacon and his first wife, Valerie Ginn.

Bobby took to fighting the way a surfer takes to water: the waves and crests, the highs and the pummeling lows. Valerie, as girlfriend, then wife, then mother of their children, was proud of Bobby and how he found a way out of poverty for them. But the brain-sloshing blows, the women, and the alcohol began to take their toll, and soon Bobby couldnt hear her anymore. How couldValerie reclaim her agency when the partner shed relied on to be her champion no longer seemed to know who he was outside the ring?

Using haunting, visceral language to evoke the emotion of the fight, and incorporating direct quotations from Bobby himself,Fighting Is Like a Wifereveals how boxing, like love and poetry, can be brutal, unguarded, and surprising.