Glass Jaw
By Raisia Tolchinsky
Persea Books
ISBN 978-0-89255-579-6

Perhaps the most informative line in Raisa Tolchinsky’s debut collection comes in the middle of the last poem, “Canto 1,” when she writes, “I packed my bags, said I will be my Virgil/in the story I could never quite begin. /Where to begin?” It is in this moment, this line, that the role of our poet/subject is confirmed: this collection is a seventy-page journey to the dark places and experiences of our young poet hero, her ascension from that place, and the light of her future in the world. 

A glass jaw is not a desired attribute in the boxing world. The phrase implies a weak chin and constitution in general; a boxer with a vulnerability, easily knocked out, a weak spot. As a collection, Glass Jaw presents itself as a formidable threat, built on the giant Corinthian pillars of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. But at the heart of this collection is a vulnerability—the glass jaw—revealed, an assault and breach of trust; the danger, even in a place of physical empowerment (like a boxing gym), for women to fall victim. Safety is a myth, I’ll tell my daughter, if I have one. (p.14) This allegory we know all too well.

Tolchinsky’s Glass Jaw hitches itself both in structure and device to The Inferno, beginning with a chorus of muses, fellow female boxers, gladiators in her underworld NYC gym (Bless this underworld of secret choir. p.6), then moving to a brief reprieve in purgatory, before plunging into the darkest of moments at the center of the collection, and the slow climb out of that despair. 

The muses, the gladiators are our first guides to this space, and their verses all respond indirectly to the opening lines of Juvenal’s infamous Satire VI,: “How can a woman be decent/sticking her head in a helmet/denying the sex she was born with?”. The boxers each, in their own voices, debate this pervasive ideal of a warrior, indeed a woman, as nothing more than the weaker sex in denial of truth. Interspersed throughout these voices, Tolchinsky provides the reader with the Juvenal line as a refrain, reimagined and rearranged. Each time, poking holes into that idea of denial of gender and truth of strength. These six box/prose poems act like an existential bell between rounds, a chance for the fighters to recede to their corners, while the ring girl, our guide, the poet in this case, holds up a new card, contradicting and questioning our (even her own) conditioning.

The opposite of “catcher’s mitt” is "how do I knock an opponent out?” The opposite of “can a fight never end” is “woman.” You don’t believe me? Be very still and watch—it’s not decent to kill in the ring, unlike UFC, where you can get away with sticking your hands anywhere you want. We’re regal here. Her honor matters, even if she’ll take your head and call it a dance. Dance, the audience says, and the ring in a cold winter becomes a guillotine. You’re wearing a helmet—won’t matter when the blade comes. Stop denying you’re afraid. I’ve done it my whole life with spandex wrapped around my waist. I want them to say she was a most terrifying kind of beauty: born to keep killing, her lipstick covered with glass.  (p.9)

Throughout Glass Jaw, objects of feminine beauty (lipstick covered with glass, diamonds of salt) are armed with slivers of brutality. The repetition of glass specifically as a symbol of both fragility and violence also becomes a device for reflection and examination. Spectacles/scopes and lenses, gym mirrors, vanity mirrors, leaded glass mirrors, (so many mirrors), providing a terrifying “fun house” of distorted reflection and refracted light. This metaphor of leaded glass mirrors specifically, of manipulated or charged and false light leading the poet and the reader through this dark place, is meant as an ominous warning: beware the one holding the mirror. Beware the gaze. Always look for the true sun.

The hinge of the collection’s two larger sections comes in Purgatory, the in-between. Two poems, one providing the echo of the muses with the final line, “We thought if/we built what haunted us/a cage we could touch it/and survive.”, and one introducing the reader to “Coach”, the devil figure who looms over the final section. 

As we enter this last section (a collection of cantos presented in reverse in order to ascend and rescue both subject and reader from the pit), we are confronted with Tolchinsky’s inscription at the gates, HERE THIS HOLLOW SPACE, and a line from Lucille Clifton, “oh where have you fallen to/son of the morning/beautiful lucifer” and Dante, “And now–with fear/I set it down in meter.”

Unlike the Inferno’s gate inscription (Abandon all hope, ye who enter) Tolchinsky employs Clifton and Aligehieri’s lines as both clever trigger warning and intention. Ahead lies a narrative of deceit and violent trust, and also I, the poet, am brave enough to write it. 

Tolchinsky chooses to reverse the Cantos, beginning with 34, leading us into the underworld of the boxing gym, revealing with a metered pace the diabolic “Coach” until we, too, like the subject, are conditioned, our eyes have adjusted, and we, too, can see in this darkness, 

Everywhere I went I was

the ring I peered into,

longing for my own sunlit face I found him

in front of me, behind me

angled to the side—

Canto 27, No Exit (p.40)

The spiraling in these rings (Underneath the boxing ring/there was another ring,/then another. —Canto 11, Upon the Margin, p. 58) leads to the center in (the middle of three) Canto 10,  Solve for Me That Knot, with a seismic shift. Here we have a recollection, a lyric narrative of a particular night, but it is superimposed over emotional truth, a series of lines and lines and lines of faint gray “no”.  This Canto of no is then repeated on the facing page but this time with the same typeface as the rest of the collection. Not an echo here, but a solid voice. This Canto 10 pairing acts like the leaded mirror, the fractured light and color, at first distorting and finally reflecting truth to both poet and reader. And from here Tolchinsky starts her ascension out of this world and this collection, and into her actual power.

Tolchinsky is in full control as both guide and subject in Glass Jaw. She is her own (and our) Virgil, writing herself out of this darkness and leaving the shadowed world behind, but not before being shaped and forever changed by it. Though fierce in that discipline, her tenderness for the souls with whom she shared this world, for herself, and for a future generation of women fighters, babies and daughters with their fists born curled, is poignant and real. Simply put, Tolchinsky (and Glass Jaw) is a triumph.

MEGHAN MALONEY-VINZ was a distinguished multi-sport athlete from a small Wisconsin town. When glory days gave way to reality, she traded her cleats, ball, and racket, for poetry and parenting. Since receiving her MFA from Hamline University in 2007, Maloney-Vinz has managed several literary journals including Water~Stone, and Runestone Review(s) and a small book arts press (broadcraft press). Though her writing muscles need daily coaxing, her spiral is still pretty solid, even on demand.