Fighting Is Like a Wife | Eloisa Amezcua
Boxing, like love, is about vulnerability. It's about standing in front of someone knowing you will hurt each other and trying to make it out alive. In Fighting is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love story--and the tragedy--of two-time world boxing champion Bobby "Schoolboy" Chacon and his first wife Valorie Ginn. Bobby took to fighting the way a surfer takes to water: the waves and crests, the highs and the pummeling lows. Valorie, 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 couldn't hear her anymore. How could Valorie reclaim her agency when the partner she'd 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 Wife reveals how boxing, like love and poetry, can be brutal, unguarded, and surprising.
Fighting Is Like a Wife | 
