Fighting is Like a Wife

In these stunning poems, the ring is a space of corruption and redemption, brutality and tenderness, ambition and desperation. Eloisa Amezcua writes into the histories of the fighter Bobby Chacon and his wife, Valorie Ginn, with striking electricity and sensitivity, illuminating how the violent intertwining of two paths in the ring can have profound consequences for the lives lived outside it. Fighting Is Like a Wife is a tour de force, and Eloisa Amezcua is one of my favorite poets working today. -Laura van den Berg Eloisa Amezcua's gorgeous second collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, immerses us in the myriad trepidations and violences that orbit the fight game. These brilliantly tactile, visceral poems excavate the relentless combinations of jabs and apologies that come from men who only know how to talk with their hands. It takes a poet of exceptional empathy and uncanny dexterity to turn the difficult lives of Valorie Ginn and Bobby Chacon into verse as Amezcua has done. Beyond the rough history here is the poet's perfect ear: we can hear the gloves when they land, we can hear two people tearing apart like a contract that shouldn't have been signed. The book's title might be a quote from Chacon, but all the testimony inside is gifted to us by this marvelous poet. -Adrian Matejka Praise for From the Inside Quietly A complex examination of how we come to love and how we come to be, the poems in From the Inside Quietly create an intricate and urgent music of the border and the feminine body. With a voice that's barbed at times but also full of empathy and grace, this is a powerful debut that will continue to rattle and quake in the mind. -Ada Limon In From the Inside Quietly, Eloisa Amezcua writes, 'in my own mind / I'm a mirror. / I see everything / except myself.' This book holds reflection-both the noun and verb of it-at its core, from 'the bottom of the pool / opal and shimmering' to meditations on language, intimacy, and the self. These poems trouble themselves with what we know and what we don't: what a daughter knows of her mother's difficult childhood; what a psychiatrist knows of his patients that their own families don't know; what we know of our lovers; and what we know of ourselves. Despite all the tricks of light and shadow a mirror can play, all the tricks of distance and shape and proportion, in this stunning collection we encounter a poet who sees, feels, and writes with aching clarity. -Maggie Smith Eloisa Amezcua's From the Inside Quietly is a formally inventive book of lyric love poetry. But it is also a book about how love is a naturally clandestine thing. All yearning begins in a din of silence: 'Dragonflies hum over the lake / and the scalding dock / where you sit for hours, arms / tired from so much reaching.' Amezcua is a poet who means to see what can't be said. This is a beautiful debut. -Jericho Brown