Shadow Boxer - by Martin Cossio (Paperback)

About the Book

Shadow Boxer chronicles the author's gym journey from skinny-fat underdog to super welterweight live dog.

Book Synopsis

Written with a sense of urgency, Shadow Boxer is an intense, meditative, form-conscious collection of poems by a fighter who has "lived and learned," as notes award-winning author Matthew Zapruder. In eighteen poems, it delineates the author's personal fitness journey, his transformation from skinny-fat underdog to super welterweight live dog. The speaker in this book is a literal and figurative shadow boxer, a first-generation Mexican American who fights not for but with his life, as remarks New York Times best-selling author Jill Alexander Essbaum. In this debut, Cossio fights with his "sub"/substitute self to become a tenured teacher, fights to earn the nickname "Professor," to be "heard as well as seen," and seen as fit to be a father. These fight-poems will capture an audience's imagination by showcasing how one can fight for their life, "an American dream," by fighting for sport and with an underlying message that through drive, discipline, and dedication one can overcome their shadow self to reinvent themself on any stage of the world and at any stage in life.

Review Quotes

"This is an electric, confident, compelling debut from a poet who has lived and learned, and puts that knowledge and experience into poetry. Martin Cossio's poems are smart and skilled, full of force and tragedy and humor and real life. They are exciting and dangerous as life itself."

-Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem

"Martin Cossio works the heavy bag foregoing caution to shadowbox with himself. Weaving prose poems with tales of the tape, Cossio excavates self-actualization and the American Dream 'rocking bling like boxers out the ring.' These poems sing self-respect and transcendence long after 15 rounds are over. You might see stars after Cossio's bars!"

-Mike Sonksen, author of Letters To My City

"'I was winning the fight no one thought I'd survive, ' Martin Cossio writes in this profoundly intimate and deftly lyric collection. In Shadow Boxer, Cossio isn't fighting for his life. The poet is fighting with his life. The self in shadow, the faceless dark shape cast upon the wall when too much light bears down. It is through these visceral, vulnerable encounters on the page, Cossio's shadow finds its face. These are disciplined poems, with regimented heartbeats and musculatures I can only describe as masculine. The honesty of these poems is their entrypoint. Even what's brutal is beautiful in Martin Cossio's hands."

-Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Would-Land and Hausfrau