[Persea Books; 2024]
Glass Jaw unfolds in the gritty lamplight of a windowless boxing gym. In Raisa Tolchinsky’s take on Dante’s Inferno, we are ushered into hell not by Virgil but by a chorus of female boxers. The collection’s first section, “Diatribe on Female Gladiators,” comprises poems named after these women—Delia, Carmen, Anna, Kate, and others. Tolchinsky grants us a snapshot into their inner lives—sometimes why they fight, sometimes who they fight for, but consistently, how fighting feels for them.
Take the poem “Esther,” in which the speaker is “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).” Pain, so goes the popular Elaine Scarry quote, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” Tolchinsky’s simile—fishing hooks in a drawstring bag—honors the mystifying quality of pain remembered as opposed to pain felt. She summons it through the figurative; pain exists only to point beyond itself, toward things that inflict pain (fishing hooks), or otherwise, toward things that are ineffable. The latter appears in “Samiya,” where, “pain knits / itself new shapes. / Not clouds / but neurons. / They drag / their wired / tails across / the center / of my mind.” Pain is glimpsed through negation, pain is sentient, pain will not stand still, but most importantly, pain is the key that grants us intimate access to each speaker in this chorus.
But this is not private pain; this is pain on display. The poem “Carmen” forces the reader to reckon with how gender operates in this space: “the audience wants whiplash, / wants a mouthpiece slick with blood, / a few loose teeth / and applause loud enough to crack a beer bottle.” Boxing fans have a bacchanalian thirst for spectacle, but Tolchinsky promptly undercuts the scene’s frenzy with the following stanza, which reads, “then, they want silence, / they want you crying in the corner like a still-life— / a vase, / a bonnet, / a little bird.” So, the audience wants a performance of violence, one that can be rapidly sanitized or rendered inert, as denoted by the arresting reference to still life which has the effect of halting the poem’s forward momentum.
The poem’s subtitle reads “[You’re a woman until you spit twice in the bucket],” a phrase which wrestles with the opening line, “the audience / wants you to be a woman.” It’s unclear whether the subtitle represents Carmen’s definition or the audience’s. Either way, the phrases in tandem evoke the scrutiny placed on fighters in what is traditionally a patriarchal space. (This poem in particular feels prescient, given the “frenzy” in this year’s Olympics, in which false claims about a boxer’s gender identity led to online vitriol and hate). Tolchinsky’s book predates the controversy, but the sentiment remains: Preoccupation with a fighter’s gender threatens to eclipse their athletic achievement, the reason they’re in the ring at all. Indeed, the collection’s epigraph, which Tolchinsky uses as a refrain in later poems, is a line from Juvenal’s Satire IV (written sometime between 100 and 127 AD), “how can a woman be decent, sticking her head in a helmet, denying the sex she was born with?”
What I like most about Tolchinksy’s rotating chorus of fighters is the breadth of humanity they offer the reader. With only a single poem to represent each fighter, the poet is economical and precise in choosing details that balance the gym’s more foreboding side with countless acts of care; —“she slipped that cotton baton / into my pocket between bells,” and genuine admiration —“ponytail so convincing I almost forget / your jab in the first round stung / my cheek into a smile.” In the poem “Kira” we see a rare instance of an intimate exchange continuing outside the ring: “I held her hand / as she drove / me home / even my pinky finger / crooked.” These moments culminate in “Purgatory,” where the chorus becomes unified, the poem representing a kind of Judgment Day for the coaches: “they should have asked / for forgiveness before they killed us / with push-ups, sit-ups, goblin squats.” She writes, “we sit at our long table / and pour wine. . . . / The coaches swallow every drop like they have nothing to fear.”
It soon becomes apparent that this place is not hell because of the pain, it’s not hell because of the fighting, and it’s not hell because of the other fighters. It’s hell, most of all, because of the coaches. The coaches, at best, are pests who regularly try their luck with the fighters— “will you go on a date with me? Do you have a boyfriend?” However, these interactions soon become threatening. The speaker of “Canto 22” says, “I don’t want to make beautiful / how, stepping off the treadmill, this man / slapped my ass and finally said my name / wrong.” “Good girl” “faster, baby,” says this particular trainer. And at worst, they are abusive. The trainers’ violence becomes explicit in the collection’s third section, where the aperture contracts: We now follow a central speaker making sense of her relationship with one particular coach. A picture is painted of a master manipulator; “the messages came in the night, two a.m. or later. / good that i’m a coward or i’d kill / myself.” “Canto Ten” is simply a downpour of the word “no,” over and over. Despite this, our speaker grapples with consent in a disturbing account of psychological abuse— “nothing happened, I say, / that I didn’t agree to.”
At times, I found myself wondering whether the collection’s adherence to Inferno was restricting the poems slightly; later poems surge away from the boxing ring in a style refreshingly different from the first section with its close-ups on the chorus of fighters. These later poems leap through time and space; we see the speaker as a teenager, the speaker in Iceland, in Italy, in Virginia, refracting the story over and over from different angles. Meanwhile, the coach is depicted as “devil, monster, minotaur.” This image repeats: “how I wanted to hold / his horned head in my lap, / for his pronged tail to encircle me / to tell me which ring / I belonged.” or “No, it was not loneliness. / It was the devil’s whip against my rib.” At times the repeated depiction of the coach as devil felt like a slightly strained attempt to maintain thematic coherence.
The third section, called “Here This Hollow Space,” is told in a series of thirty-four shining cantos; a raw account of abuse and the struggle that accompanies any attempt to speak of such an experience. “Canto 33” asks, “Can I write this?” as “his weathered ghost / arrives in our bed, / face cratered with letters I’ve flung / to make him visible.” Here, the physical pain of fighting and the psychological pain of enduring abuse cohere in the act of writing it down (letters are obdurate, they impact the face). I’m reminded of a quote from Elisa Gabbert’s essay “Somethingness (or, Why Write?),” which states: “It’s fashionable now to object on principle to the idea that writing is hard. Writing isn’t hard, this camp says; working in coal mines is hard. Having a baby is hard.” She goes on to say, “but this is a category error. Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor is hard . . . what’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain.” I think Tolchinsky is tousling with these different types of “hardness.” In the first section, we encounter physical, athletic endurance. In the third, the endurance required to wrestle a story from the depths of yourself. This kind of psychological endurance culminates in “Canto Two”: “I tried to tell it in the voices / of other women. I tried to tell it / by way of prayer. I tried to tell it / by way of blessing, I tried to tell it / by way of blame. I tried to tell it small. / I tried to tell it sideways,” and the list goes on, relentlessly. The structure of the collection has led us here: The momentum of the first section, complete with depictions of physical pain and endurance, continues to assert itself on the later poems, in which pain moves outside the immediacy of the boxing ring, into a psychological sphere.
Tolchinksy’s crisis of telling reminds me of Natalie Shapero’s essay “Tell Me How You Really Feel.” My favorite line in this essay is “the poem is a door that opens out onto a wall.” Shapiro thinks the poet’s relationship to their poem is always somewhat “adversarial” because the poem is by nature “short on empathy and attention” and therefore refuses “to yield adequate time or space to say all that wants to be said.” This feels particularly true of Glass Jaw. Combat occurs between the fighters themselves, between the speaker and the coach, but also between the poet and their poems. “Canto Two” concludes “I tried to tell it without entering. The only way was down. / Grip the railing, dear one.” Perhaps each poem is its own miniature boxing ring, a site at once frenetic and time sensitive.
I recently learnt about the concept of the “pain cave” in endurance sports. The idea is that there is a mentality athletes enter in which pain ceases to be entirely prohibitive and acts instead as a kind of fuel. I found myself thinking about this “cave” as I was working my way through Glass Jaw, which is interested in the places pain can take its subject. In the first section we encounter acute, present-tense pain in the boxing ring. In the third, the pain is more diffuse. It is the pain of having survived something. It is the pain of encountering past selves. It is the non-linear pain of moving forward only to find yourself back where you started. Bringing these two modes of experience into the same space is what lends the collection its effervescence. “I wasn’t alone in wanting to put / down what I carried. / The coach who lived in the crack house. / The coach who had been in jail. / The women who had been raped, assaulted, / lost children. . . . we found out these / things about each other slowly, carried them / until we collided.” Pain in Glass Jaw is a fuel in several senses; fuel for individual performance, fuel for the collection itself, but it also shows that pain, when shared, can be its own antidote.
Imogen Osborne is a writer living in Ithaca, NY. She recently earned an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she teaches creative and expository writing.
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