Description
In its five year anniversary edition, Topaz Winters’ Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing returns with ten new poems, a revised body of work, & a foreword by bestselling author Blythe Baird. An examination of desire as religion, food as compulsion, & illness as a gut reflex in the face of girlhood’s little violences, Portrait haunts the landscape of self-mythology & cuts straight into its own marrow. This book is a howl in the night, a fracture through the dark, as omnivorous & revelatory today as it was five years ago. “Must I say it to survive?” asks its speaker, balanced on the knife’s edge between confessional & manifesto. “Then I will.”
Awards
2018 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize Finalist
2018 Broken River Prize Finalist
Praise for Topaz Winters
Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing is urgent confession, kisses hungrier than prayer. Beneath the thirst is the threat of forgiveness and the darknesses that call your name. Here is the pleasure of burning alive.
—Traci Brimhall, Our Lady of the Ruins
Crackling with the velocities, repetitions, and dangers of want–a voracious heat that seduces, even as it warns. Winters manifests the constructive and destructive energies of desire in language that sparks.
—Gabrielle Bates, Judas Goat
Fingers become matchsticks, people become sunlight, and the body becomes punctuation in a collections of love poems that is as much mourning as it is blessing.
—Zeina Hashem Beck, O
The voices in Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing confess dangerous desires. They’re unafraid to repeat the words lonely and want. I trust their warning: be careful what you worship. I needed this book, needed someone to say that some deaths have an end.
–K. Iver, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
About Topaz Winters
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing… MORE