In-Person: GLASS JAW by Raisa Tolchinsky

Please join us for an in-person poetry reading celebrating Glass Jaw by Raisa Tolchinsky! The author will be in conversation with Rachel DeWoskin.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw is a gripping, Dantaen rendering of a young woman's physical and spiritual trials in the boxing ring.

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. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.

Raisa Tolchinsky writes about love, grief, and the wisdom of the body. Raisa earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She is a recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee. She has previously lived in Chicago, Bologna (Italy), and New York, where she trained as an amateur boxer. She was the 2022-2023 George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Currently, she is a student at Harvard Divinity School.

Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); two poetry collections, Two Menus (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and absolute animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). She has received a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association's Alex Award, and an Academy of American Poets Award, among others.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States