she’s an ocean she fills the room like water she is water she sways like water she rocks as she sings quietly she mouths the words to her favorite song on repeat again & again quietly one wrong word & poof she might unravel unspool there there on her bedroom floor one wrong step in any direction one move & the wind she is current she is air she moves & the world at her feet the world she is scatters
Valorie
Feature Date
- May 25, 2022
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“Valorie” from FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE: by Eloisa Amezcua.
Published by Coffee House Press on APRIL 12, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Eloisa Amezcua.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Amelia Golden
Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, was published by 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. A MacDowell fellow, her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
“Through formally varied poems about the real-life featherweight boxer Bobby Chacon and his wife, Amezcua’s second collection probes notions of violence, sport, marriage and gender roles.”
—The New York Times
“In Amezcua’s work every possible choice available to a poet has been made with intention and expert execution. . . . 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.”
—Angie Dribben, The Los Angeles Review
“The vibrant second collection from Amezcua explores the life of world-boxing champion Bobby Chacon and his wife, Valerie Ginn. . . . Using redaction, repetition, and a dizzying variety of concrete poems that are like a literary magic-eye, Amezcua reveals new implications beneath the haunting text.”
—Publishers Weekly
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