“Even as her speakers grapple with violence, competition, and isolation under the patriarchal spotlight, Tolchinsky, through masterful craft and storytelling, weaves a web of feminine solidarity, deftly navigating the paradoxical connection of each punch. Hers is a poetics of profound intimacy and fierce joy.” - Katherine James in Pleiades

“Glass Jaw is a potent inquiry into the brutality and beauty of fighting, the ‘underworld of secret choir’ that can be the site of both suffering and salvation. Raisa Tolchinsky’s lines arrive with the swiftness and solidness of a punch, leaving devastation and wonder in their wake. An astonishing, unforgettable collection.”― Laura van den Berg

Glass Jaw
Raisa Tolchinsky

Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women’s boxing based on the poet's time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish “rings” of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis.

“Physical torture, writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, 'is language-destroying.' Glass Jaw tracks a young woman seeking a new voice through the gendered and punishing inferno of the boxing ring: 'Before the ring I made a life out of language / but there were places it would not reach― / the ring needed no words, no stone / to crown me in concussion.' In poems as vulnerable and tensile as glass, Tolchinsky bravely frees the wired-shut jaw of abuse dividing ‘a body and the rest of its life.’”― Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

“What a stunning debut from an essential new voice! Raisa Tolchinsky writes with the virtuosity of a true fighter, transporting us, via her profound lyrics, to the twilit world of the boxing ring and beneath, to Dantean realms of deep reckoning and transcendent song. Glass Jaw sparkles with rare intensity; let this book light your way through darkness, to the stars.”― Kiki Petrosino

Raisa Tolchinsky has published poems in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other journals and magazines. She earned her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She was the 2022–2023 George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. Previously, she lived in Chicago, Bologna (Italy), and New York City, where she trained as an amateur boxer.

Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $23.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-579-6 / 88 pages / Poetry