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

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”.

Topaz Winters is a poet, essayist, editor, creative director, speaker, scholar, actress, & multidisciplinary artist working with a foundation in literature. Among her internationally award-winning & critically-acclaimed creative credits include working as the author of four books (most recently Portrait of My Body As a Crime I'm Still Committing, a finalist in the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book & Broken River Prizes), writer & star of the short film SUPERNOVA (dir. Ishan Modi, recipient of awards from the Newark International, Across Asia Youth, Laurie Nelson, My Rode Reel, Singapore International Student, & CINE Golden Eagle Film Festivals), editor-in-chief & creative director at the arts organisation Half Mystic, speaker of the TEDx talk Healing Is a Verb, & creator of the digital art installation Love Lives Bot on Twitter. Her research on poetry, identity, & the sociopolitical underpinnings of queerness in Singapore is published in the Journal of Homosexuality, the oldest & most famous peer-reviewed journal focused on the study of gender & sexuality. On her blog at topazwinters.com, Topaz writes weekly love letters to a worldwide audience of thousands. Her work focuses on flightlessness, resilience, heritage, states of womanhood, softness & savagery, positions of the body, & how to create beautiful things for those still listening. She has been published in Sundog Lit, DIALOGIST, & Cosmonauts Avenue, profiled by The Straits Times, The Business Times, & the Boston Poetry Slam, & commended by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the National YoungArts Foundation, & Button Poetry, among others. She is the youngest Singaporean ever to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the youngest writer ever to be published by Math Paper Press, & the youngest scholar ever to be published in the Journal of Homosexuality. Topaz is deeply fond of chai tea, classic rock, wildflowers, & the colour of the sky when nothing is dreaming of it. She was born in 1999, resides in Singapore, & studies literature & film at Princeton University. She is in love with most quiet things. She is grateful you're here.

Lim Charlotte (b.1998, Singapore) is an emerging artist who is currently pursuing her Fine Arts Degree at LASALLE College of the Arts. Exploring the nuances of the human condition and interrelationships, Lim's work revolves around the human body, its ornate form, its placement, its existence in a space shared amongst other matter. As an art form, she believes the human body and its different parts can be dismantled and remodelled; and be grounded in new meaning. Sensing the notions of scale within spaces all matter inhabit; the minuscule, the vast, and everything in between, Lim creates a dialogue around the fragility of traditionalism and the elucidation of self defying sexual affirmation - striving to become both the content and its critique, adhering to classical norms while admonishing them. The themes she usually works with are space, power, and conversely, vulnerability and fragility. All her works are derived from personal experiences, such as addiction, mental illnesses, being institutionalised - and thus attempts to physically manifest individual solace. She has exhibited at Gajah Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (ICAS) and Goodman Arts Centre and was awarded the 30 Art Friends Scholarship in 2015.