Name: Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing
ISBN: 9781733881609

Topaz Winters

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. Luminous, tender, & unflinching, Portrait cuts straight to the marrow. To all those whose bodies have been more bruise than human, this book is for you.

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

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If hunger is a synonym for violence, it mistakes itself too often for mercy.

I hate my body, meaning I'm welding my own cage, carving my own tombstone, meaning I am so tired of trying to change the ending of this story.

& I started whispering I'm in love with you I'm in love with you I'm in love with you, like I wasn’t a coward for taking three-quarters of a poem to say it. 

heleen de boever

Born on the cusp of the new millennium, Topaz Winters has accomplished something that takes many writers a lifetime; that is, the development of a singular, recognisable voice. This voice chimes loudly throughout this collection, a lyrical cadence that builds and softens, whisking the reader along. Portrait is perhaps more corporeal than her previous collections, in its explicitly physical language and visceral imagery. There is a lot of fire and a lot of food, with ties in with Winters’ exploration of love like something ravenous. The usual culprits make an appearance (girlhood, longing, mental health), but that’s not to say the images are repetitive. If anything, there is a lot of if not thematic, certainly formal experiment in this collection. The poems are smartly sculpted and pay homage to Winters’ masterful command of an impressive range of stylistic devices (personal favourite examples are ‘Alternate Names for Gay Girls (after Danez Smith)’, ‘Self-Diagnosis’, ‘Infernal / Inferno’, and ‘July’). This amounts to a clever blend of form and function, to the impression of a writer who knows how to choose the appropriate technique to reach the desired affect, without ever sinking into artifice. The result, as a whole, is nothing short of rapturous. 

Note: This review was written in exchange for an advanced reader copy.

illa

Show me how poetry, in all its corruption, brought us back to life again.

Kristian Porter

In the beginning there was want / I can’t remember what came after that

Before I go any further, let me say that I loved Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing in a way that I haven’t loved a piece of literature in a very long time. If you take nothing else away from this review, know that Topaz Winters will touch your heart, squeeze it, rip it out, then offer it on a plate as nourishment, sometimes in the course of a single poem, and in the end, you will be grateful to have witnessed it. 

This collection of poems will take you on a journey of want, of hunger, and of forgiveness. From the opening poem, I was floored by the vulnerability of the pieces and the fluidity of the language. I know it is an often overused term in the poetry world, but there is no better way to describe this collection than “tender.”

With explorations of sexuality, body image, identity, and love, every poem in this collection felt raw and honest, at times like looking in on an intimate moment that I wasn’t sure I was meant to witness. Every single poem was rich with voice and urgency, and I never felt like the collection was lacking or slowing in pace. 

Overall, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing gave me everything I wanted. It filled me with light, with warmth, with want, and never left me feeling unsatisfied. It is a collection of poems I will be thinking about for a long time. 

  I was lucky enough to read an Advanced Readers copy of this collection.

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

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