Portrait of My Body As a Crime I'm Still Committing

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.”

Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022, winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & a LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024, finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project. Topaz's poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, & the National YoungArts Foundation. She lives between New York & Singapore.