Glass Jaw

Raisa Tolchinsky’s debut collection, winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, stuns the reader with a blistering beauty. These tightly crafted poems detail the narrator’s immersion in the gendered world of boxing, an immersion that is framed as a descent. The poems trace a simultaneously toxic and compelling landscape in which “the days bleed like cuts”, as the speaker chases salvation through an underworld presided over by “Coach”, an abusive trainer who “kept changing shape”.

In Glass Jaw, the quest for redemption leads the narrator through increasingly punishing physical routines until a moment of clarity arrives during a fight:

I hit her hard 
because he said that’s how you win. 
and I hit her until I remembered 
it was him who was afraid—

For the narrator of Glass Jaw, liberation ultimately arrives through the act of writing. The poem Canto 2 movingly details the process of learning to speak one’s truth with courage. This December, as the year draws to its longest darkness, these poems offered me a visceral, hard won journey towards light.