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.”
Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing was a finalist in the 2018 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (judged by Wong May) & the 2018 Broken River Prize (judged by Eduardo C. Corral). The five year anniversary special edition debuts with Button Poetry on July 2, 2024. You can talk about the collection on social media using the hashtag #crimeimstillcommitting.
Read selected poems: “Infernal / Inferno” (TRACK // FOUR), “When My First Boyfriend Learned I Was on Anti-Psychotics, He Laughed & Told Me He Always Suspected I Was Crazier Than I Let On” (Birdfeast), “Quell” (Eunoia Review), “The Night You Are Diagnosed” (DIALOGIST), “Nocturne for Changing the Subject” (Passages North), “The Psychiatrist Said I Would Outgrow My Violences” (Waxwing), “This Will Go Easier If You Can Think of Something to Believe In” (Waxwing)