Glass Jaw: Boxer Raisa Tolchinsky, MRPL '24, Reads from Her Award-winning Book of Poetry

In addition to being scholars of religion, Raisa Tolchinsky and Annette Reed share a common passion: They are both fighters—Tolchinsky, a boxer, and Reed, a trained Muay Thai fighter.

On April 18, the cold rain beat down against the windows of the Harvard Book Store as a full house of Harvard University students, faculty, and community members gathered inside to hear Tolchinsky, MRPL ’24, read from her debut collection of poems, Glass Jaw. Some attendees sat in plastic folding chairs while others lounged on the floor or leaned against bookshelves, enthralled by Tolchinsky’s visceral poetry.

The poetry reading was followed by a discussion with Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. The two discussed everything from religion and gender to poetry and fighting.

Tolchinsky shared that the first half of the book “is written in the voices of many women.” This multifocal narrative allows her to highlight and honor the diversity in the experience of being a female boxer. In the second part of the book, Tolchinsky sharpens the narrative.

“The second half crosses from a chorus of women boxers into a single voice, as she descends further and further into the ring,” she explained. In both halves, the book follows a Dantean descent and ascent through the physical, emotional, and spiritual experience of being a female boxer, a woman in a male-dominated space.

Tolchinsky delighted the crowd with readings of select poems from Glass Jaw, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry in 2023. Each poem was met with a round of applause as the audience could imagine itself in the ring with the narrator, feeling each punch and jab written on the page.

From her poem Esther [Some Things You Can’t Understand by Punching Harder], Tolchinsky read: “We never sparred the boys yet he looked at me like the rib we had stolen was between my eyes, then hit so hard I heard a sound like fishing hooks in a drawstring bag (no one really sees stars glittering above them, the dark begins at the ankles, then zips up) — he waited to say I can’t hit a girl until I was already on the ground.”

During the conversation, Reed pointed out that, amid contemporary descriptions of New York bars, basements, and boxing gyms, Glass Jaw is “peppered with religious images—images from antiquity, mythological images, and even ancient and medieval images.”

Tolchinsky explained that “So many stories, both in the book and in our lives, can be like a myth. It's so helpful when we realize what myth it is. For this book, it was Persephone. I’m grateful that we get to have help across time in telling stories that are both old and new—new because we’re living them for the first time.”

Tolchinsky read from her poem Canto 26: “Before the ring, I made a life out of language, but there were places it could not reach.” In discussion with Reed, Tolchinsky explained the circularity of this experience. When she was in the ring, she could expand beyond language; yet as she experienced this, she felt compelled to write about it.

“I had to write about it, and in writing about it, I see the ways in which there’s always that gap. That gap is what’s exciting,” Tolchinsky said. “One of the questions that animates the book is, How do we talk about what happened to us through the body? How do we find the language for that? Where does it fail?”

In using the medium of poetry, Tolchinsky found a new way to show movement on the page.

“In boxing, you have a right cross or a left hook; each move does something different in the ring,” she said. “In the same way, poetry has tools: You have enjambment, you have line breaks, you have stanzas. You have all these ways of showing movement. I began to think, What would a right cross look like on the page? What does a one-two punch look like on the page? I began to think about the line as a move.”

Ultimately, the experience Tolchinsky and Reed discussed is one of overcoming the fear of failure.

“There is a lot of trust and vulnerability in the ring. Everyone watches you hurt, fail, and succeed,” Reed explained. “Muay Thai is my primary nexus for thinking about teaching and learning, and the importance of not being afraid to fail.”

As is true for boxing, Glass Jaw is a journey through the narrator’s movement toward vulnerability, which was graciously shared with the crowd at the Harvard Book Store. It is a story of embodiment, Reed said, “embodied danger, movement, and resilience.”

These poems are an intimate expression of doing what is difficult. As Tolchinsky writes in Anna [Bless the Boxing Ring], “Bless the hard things.” She plans to use these same lessons learned from fighting to tackle her next project—writing on the heart.

—by Scarlett Rose Ford, HDS news correspondent