Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing is an award-winning, omnivorous collection of poetry residing in the space between confessional & manifesto. Portrait is interested in the immediacy of language; in girlhood as wolfhood; in the cartography of illness; in fractures through the dark; in bodies, human & water alike. Luminous, tender, & unflinching, Portrait cuts straight to the marrow. To all those whose bodies have been more bruise than human—who feel so loudly the sky turns black in fear—this book is for you.
Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing was chosen as a finalist in the 2018 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize by Singapore Unbound, & in the 2018 Broken River Prize by Platypus Press. This collection contains the poems “Guidebook for Wild Things Wishing to Be Tamed”, “Self-Diagnosis”, “Trigger”, “For H”, “But First, the Stomach”, “New York City Probably Has an Anxiety Disorder”, “Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing”, “Flood Season”, “Lightning / Hunger”, “If the Body Is an Artefact”, “Infernal / Inferno”, “When My First Boyfriend Learned I Was on Anti-Psychotics, He Laughed & Told Me He Always Suspected I Was Crazier Than I Let On”, “Alternate Names for Gay Girls”, “Quell”, “On the First Day, God Killed Himself”, “Mealtime”, “The Night You Are Diagnosed”, “Still”, “Serenade to Surrender”, “Lone / Pack”, “High Specific Heat”, “Panic Attack as Airplane Departure Time”, “Dream Sequence”, “Pandora”, “Insomnia”, “Event Horizon”, “50 Words for Snow”, “This Is a Story About Mourning”, “Healing Is”, “July”, “Call Me Before You Leave Again”, & “Hands”.
"If you're hollow, a robotic intellect, an emotional pragmatist, this breathless poetry isn't for you. If you haven't known danger because you never rubbed ecstatically against passion's razor, drawing more than blood every time, this isn't for you. If you haven't desired past drowning, clawing or swimming to the surface only to free-fall into shards of light, you haven't known love, life has been a waste--and this poetry isn't for you." --Cyril Wong, author of Below: Absence & Oneiros
"The unflinchingly brilliant and reflective words of Topaz Winters will leave you breathless and profoundly understood. Each poem serves as a window into a technicolor memory. Winters is courageous and keenly observant, a fiercely poignant voice I predict will thunder for years to come." --Blythe Baird, viral spoken word poet & award-winning author of If My Body Could Speak
"Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing throbs with the conviction and passion of young adulthood--it is a force, movement, struggle, growth." --Wong May, author of Picasso's Tears & Superstitions
"There are few writers that I struggle to pin down as much as I do with Topaz Winters. Something about the way she can twine images so neatly to collective feelings of yearning and persistence and absolute necessity is breathtaking in every sense of the word. Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing is an homage to light and all the ways it touches us and all the ways it abandons us in times of need but still manages to return. This is a collection about love, the ways we both survive it and grow with it, and desire, and the way night fades delicately into the dawn (always, always). There is a loud voice in my head begging me to also state that this is her most personal collection to date, but is it? Is it really? Winters gives you the impression of 'maybe this, or maybe not' that is unmistakeable, and lingering, and incredibly effective. You are not meant to know everything. This is clear. This is riveting. You can't help but keep looking at it. ... Topaz Winters is a poet to keep your eye on. If you haven't noticed her yet, you will. She'll make sure of it." --Caitlin Conlon, viral Tumblr poet & author of Cavity
"'This is the way a girl becomes a bomb, ' Topaz Winters declares, in this ticking register of girlhood, illness, and queer desire. Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing is a palimpsest, upon which Winters writes and rewrites every nightmare and fairytale made up in the caverns of her glorious imagination. The work is haunted with such hope, nerve and tenderness that break the heart open." --Logan February, author of Mannequin In the Nude & associate director at Dovesong Labs
