Raisa Tolchinsky discusses boxing, writing, and her new book of poetry Glass Jaw

Recently, I sat down with author Raisa Tolchinsky, writer of the 2024 poetry collection Glass Jaw, which focused on her time as a boxer years ago. Also a fiction writer and a professor, Tolchinsky’s work has been published in The Boston Review, the Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly, and more, and she works as the Creative Writing Specialist at Harvard Divinity School. A curious and extremely open personality, Raisa talked with me about writing and poetry’s ability to sit us down and have us listen not just to others, but to ourselves.

So I guess my first question is, obviously you work so hard on each poem to make them right, but you also have to keep in mind that they’re going in a larger collection and they all have to work together. How do you make sure when you’re writing that they each stand on their own, but also as a whole?

I think it’s a fabulous question. I think that there’s something about assembling a manuscript where it does feel like telling a story. But it’s like putting together a mosaic, so often I’ll think about a myth or classical stories. Is this a descent? Am I going upwards, am I going downwards, going in a circle? What is the shape of the story that I’m trying to tell? And in that way, I think it does feel like there’s one part of me that’s looking at, holistically, how does it feel to move through the collection? 
Where do I begin and where do I end up? I’m also a fiction writer, so I am often wondering, what is the story of this collection? And often the story is the thing I would not have known before I wrote what I wrote. 
It’s not something that I could have told you before I wrote it, it’s that the writing process itself helps me to see what the story is. Each individual poem is in service of that greater question. And then there’s the poems on the page level, right? 
How are they working as a whole? Or how are they working individually? But it does feel like each one has a purpose and a place in a mosaic of a larger picture. 
Or even one of those paintings, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but it looks like one image and then you zoom in and then there’s another tiny image, like a face. That’s what it feels like to write a book for me. I also listen to a lot of albums and playlists. It really helps me put together books.

So, your poems here are about something that’s very sort of physical and and you’re trying to describe it in a way that people really do connect with the experiences that you had and that, of course, your fellow boxers had. 
How do you ensure people get that physical feeling? Writers might describe the night sky as “a bruise” but it’s not the same as physically feeling a bruise or a cut.

Well, I don’t think I went into the book thinking about that question, so I guess I can answer it in hindsight. I often say writing things, like writing a poem or putting together a book, is so often more intelligent than my conscious brain is. I’ll look and see that, for example, there’s a lot of sounds of the bells and the sound of the boxing mitts. I was so immersed in that world. I didn’t have to try so hard to have those details come through because I was just living it. 
And so in that way, it wasn’t me thinking about craft first, it was me living this hard thing first. And because of that, I was writing mostly for myself in the beginning to try to process what it was that I was experiencing. Hopefully, the feelings and the sensory details and the disgusting things that happen, and the beautiful things that happen, can come through because I was living them.

Yeah. There’s one poem in here where there’s a line about putting lotion over a bruise and making it shiny. That to me was one where I really felt that physicality. It’s a beautiful line, but it also does still give a super physical sort of sense when you read it.

That line about the bruise, how people cover up bruises, was something I was fortunate enough to never have to have considered before I started boxing. I hadn’t seen anyone really do that. So I wasof obsessed with how all the boxers have different tips and tricks of how to cover a bruise. 
 I really do believe the more intensely you’re living and the more present you are to the details of your life, the more you feel that in the writing, the more it echoes throughout it.

That’s kind of a perfect segue, because I also want to talk about how you write fiction and poetry. When you’re sitting down to do one or the other, what do you feel like you can capture in poetry that maybe you would lose in a prose piece about maybe the exact same thing? Where do those genres or styles diverge?

Yeah. That’s a beautiful question. 
I feel freer in poetry. I feel less constrained, which is why it’s my preferred genre. It sort of is untethered. 
Each poem has its own set of rules and part of the joy for me is asking “How does this particular poem, or emotion, or situation function?” And I think prose is that way as well, but on a linguistic level, on a syntax level, spatially… I had a teacher, Jorie Graham, say, “a poem is how you enter out of the silence and how you exit back into silence.” So there’s this immediate experience of, “How am I breaking the silence and how am I exiting the silence?” 
that I think in prose, maybe that question feels less present for me. That tension of empty space is something I really enjoy in poetry. Because you’re thinking a lot about what isn’t said. I mean, I love fiction. 
I love writing fiction. The two experiences function as forms of running where one, for me, feels like a sprint, and one is really gearing up to write or to run a longer distance, and they just… they’re different medicines, I guess, or different experiences of time and pace and breath, and I think for me there are certain topics that just feel better when I spend more time with them on the page, and other topics where I need to discover them by creating absence, carving them out of what isn’t said.

There was an article in the New Yorker by a writer named Nick Ramus about how celebrities have recently been hiring “book stylists” who come in and pick out a certain edition of a book and send them out to the paparazzi with this specific selection. Obviously, celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Oprah have their own book clubs, but what do you think the overall cultural effect is of people seeing photos of celebrities posing like that?

I’m just sort of like, “Oh, there’s celebrities doing their thing influencing in the way that they do,” and great for them. I’d rather them hold a book than, I don’t know, a toxic beauty product. I don’t know. I’m sort of like “Go for it.” There’s so many ways to read and be with reading, and I think about deep reading a lot. Like, the book by that author maybe no one has ever heard of, but you’ve carried that book across the ocean or you carried those poems in your pocket. That, texturally, for me feels really different than a flash advertisement of a book, and I believe in a world where all of that can exist. We can celebrate them… like, great, I love that they’re advertising reading. 
Whatever pulls people into small book stores. And I also would love to talk to a book stylist! So I’m mostly fascinated. I I feel so joyful when I see people reading books that make them want to write and move them emotionally. Like, can’t it all exist side by side?

So with all of that being said, what keeps you going in the middle of issues that might be bigger and harder to discuss? Sometimes I’m sure it can be kind of hard to get out of your own head and then keep doing something that might not seem, from the outside perspective, immediately effective to change people’s minds or hearts about things.

I think it’s a super important question. There’s that W.H. Auden line that says “Poetry makes nothing happen… but is a way of happening,” Sometimes people use it and they just quote the first part, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But it is a WAY of happening. I think about that a lot. What practices in my life ground me, nourish me, and connect me to something beyond my fear so that I can participate in various kinds of revolution? If I write, and I’m able then to connect with myself in a way that slows me down enough to be able to absorb a piece of news, like deeply absorb it, that feels like a tiny act of resistance, although it’s not the only act. Sometimes I have students come to me and they’re like, “I can’t write about myself in this historical/political moment..” That feeling makes a lot of sense. But for me, writing is a way to reach beyond my fear, and it’s my fear that limits what I am able to give to the world as a whole. It could be any art practice. But writing for me is definitely one way, and what I tell students is that it’s a way to not necessarily end fear, but to be with fear completely. My meditation practice has taught me that all strong emotions change, they ebb and flow. What a gift to be an artist and watch them change.  I also have people think about the book that changed their life, the book that helped revive something. 
We don’t know what there is in us to be written that could do that for somebody else. And also, I mean, if we think about writing, it’s just a half hour of writing instead of scrolling. I think it can be small. In a day, you know, I’m doing all these other things. Sometimes it’s a half hour, but if I do that half hour, it’s like everything else changes and shifts. Robert Hass said “you can do your life’s work in a half-hour a day.”  
It’s the hardest thing in the world to just sit down. There’s a thing in improvisational jazz called fear training. It’s training yourself to be with fear and uncertainty, and I  think of writing like that.

Do you have anything else on your mind?

I think I’m just constantly apprenticing to whatever strange, wild, sort of humorous mystery is assigned to me. 
I find that’s a more joyful way to approach writing than, “I’m the one who is deciding everything.”  That’s when you start to feel stressed or not good enough and writing feels much less fun that way. I guess mainly the thing I want to say is that I’m so grateful for every day that I get to write. Even when I feel frustrated, I think about my great great grandparents who didn’t read, the women in my family, and it is a wild gift to get to spend my life doing this.

Are you sticking with poetry for now, dipping into fiction, or just going wherever?

I have another book of poems coming out, so that should be in 2027. And fiction is slow. I have something I’ve been working on for a while. What joy to keep practicing, noticing, paying attention.