Overview

Shadow Boxer chronicles the author's gym journey from skinny-fat underdog to super welterweight live dog. It combines ""muted"" sonnets, imaginative verse, and impactful prose to create an urgent and intense collection of fight poems that extend their theme of boxing to the fight of everyday life. At the heart is a series of meditations, blocks reminiscent of rings from which a fighter-lover, teacher, writer-is chiseled.

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9798899904882

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Reviews

""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 Information

Martin Cossio is the son of Mexican immigrants who met in an English learners class in El Monte, California. He was born in East L.A. and grew up skateboarding and getting into trouble in San Bernardino, part of a region in Southern California referred to as the Inland Empire, or the IE. Martin has been awarded an honorable mention by Academy of American Poets and a summer residency by Sundress Academy for the Arts. His poems have been published by various journals, including The Lyric, Modern Haiku, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. He was named the first national runner-up for Inlandia Institute's 2025 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. A graduate of UCR, Palm Desert's MFA program and a former poetry editor and copy editor of The Coachella Review, Martin teaches at a local high school, trains at a neighborhood gym, and lives in ""the blade"" with his xolo, Squintly.

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