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 author of the full-length poetry collections So, Stranger (2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing (2019) & poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (2017). She is the founder & editor-in-chief of the internationally-acclaimed publishing house, literary journal, & arts organization Half Mystic. She is a winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest. Her work has been published in & featured by Diode, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Straits Times, Entropy, the Boston Poetry Slam, the Singapore Writers Festival, & more!