Sounds of Want & Pain

Review of Topaz Winters’ Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (2019)
by Samantha Neugebauer

Topaz Winters’ latest poetry collection, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing, ruminates on the poet’s desire, illness, and survival. These dark and yearning poems remind us of the body’s relationship with nature and love’s relationship with death and destruction (memento mori). The latter finds its fullest expression in poems like “Infernal / Inferno” and “Event Horizon.” In these poems and many others, Winters uses repetition to create an urgent and fast-moving texture (i.e. “You said it & so it belongs to me./ You said it & so I’m sleeping awake/ again, you said it & so you’re leaving”). Her lines rapidly accumulate with her signature frenetic pacing and though readers may easily guess where Winters is heading, there is a satisfyingly breathlessness when readers arrive with Topaz at her final destination. Despite her dark subject matter, there is much life-affirming positivity. On her website, Winters writes, “I believe that in this dark world we live in, we must be lighthouses for each other. I hope my art can be a lighthouse for you.” Winters is a poet who believes in the ascendency of messy miracles.

In an interview, author Ottessa Moshfegh praised the book Less Than Zero and claimed that it could only have been written by someone very young (Bret Easton Ellis was twenty-one when he published it). The same could be said about Portrait. Winters’ poetic velocity and unabashed self-awareness feel powered by the poet’s precocity. Barely out of her teens, she is a poet, public speaker, creator of digital art installations, actor, blogger, and, not least of all, an Ivy League college student. She is the youngest Singaporean ever to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the youngest scholar to be published in the Journal of Homosexuality, and thousands of fans follow her blog and subscribe to her “love letter” newsletter. Published in May, Portrait is her fourth published book and it was a finalist for the 2018 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize by Singapore Unbound & the Broken River Prize by Platypus Press.

Winters’ autobiographical verses are characterized by their conspicuous self-voyeurism, which places her work squarely within the confessional genre, an artist movement that emerged in the late 1950s in the United States. Notables include Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, and Robert Lowell. Anne Sexton, another early practitioner of the form, also had early success like Winters. According to literary scholar Charles Molesworth, confessional poetry can be understood as a “degraded branch of Romanticism” that unflinchingly explores painful psychological and physical conditions. At its best, it is considered poetry about our most private realms, and at its worst, it can be self-indulgent. In Winters’ poetry, mental and physical pain converge on the topics of suicide and suicide ideation. Dying for love—or feeling like you might die for love—plays a major role in her writing. It’s a note that is eternal and crippling, which Winters captures in “Call Me Before You Leave Again,” where she writes about falling in love with “her own want” and even with “the sound of my own want.” Through these lines, she shows how the want itself (for someone) becomes its own tangible character in a relationship. In later poems, that want or that hunger continues to exist beyond the relationship's endpoint.

Many of Winters’ recurring images are beautiful. However, the intentions behind some of her images can be indeterminate, such as in “Infernal / Inferno,” which closes with “love her in the way a frightened deer will lock its knees &/ not move again. Even if that means burning alive.” There is an absence here. Does she mean “[I will] love her in the way…”? Or are her own thoughts louder than her boyfriend’s words, which come in the poem right after "Infernal / Inferno.” In that poem " When My First Boyfriend Learned I was on Anti-Psychotics, He Laughed & Told Me He Always Suspected I Was Crazier Than I Let On" Topaz hears her own voice speaking through her partner's ("When he spoke, I heard / my own shaking voice.”) Is she pleading for him to love her, or for herself to accept a self-love that is transformative as fire? Although some readers may delight in the mystery, others may feel Winters is woolgathering.

This death wish reappears in other poems. As in “Guidebook for Wild Things Wishing to be Tamed,” Winters writes, “Sing a song of cease. Of/ ceasing to exist, & whatever definition/ you will twist out of its ruins. Breathe in.” This verse seems to be in conversation with other poems that implicate a friend (or lover) for faking a suicide attempt. There are other kinds of manipulation happening here too; for example, in “If the Body Is an Artefact,” one verse reads, “Some days I don’t eat just so my best friend/ will worry about me.” In this poem, we see the lack of nature or naturalness in the body. We see an individual’s ability to manipulate her own body and to use that manipulated body to do her bidding. Later, she writes:

silence sing. So maybe having a body can be
learned and unlearned. Maybe it’s an act
of subterfuge, of taking aim. Like how if you
chew & chew & chew & spit out the food,
you can almost fool yourself into feeling full.

 It is impossible to read these lines without thinking about Winters’ relationship with death and suicide ideation. There are obvious signs pointing towards starvation and anorexia here; in addition, many other poems in the collection edge towards these kinds of unsettling and cyclical questions without being as explicit. They ask: what else we can “almost fool” ourselves about? Can we fool ourselves into being body-less? Is feeling full the same as feeling dead? Why remain in the body? If we unlearn having a body, can we relearn it?

The collection’s eponymous poem can be read through the allegory of Danse Macabre, meaning that death is universal, no matter our station in life. With that precedent, there is a suggestion that instead of waiting for death in this hellish life state, we might just go to death on own terms and in our own time. By using such powerful themes, with emotionally laden lines, Winters appears to express a form of desire that is almost universal. In the opening lines, Winters writes, “Consistently falling, I turn & walk through all/ the other nowheres. Robins burrow into my veins” and later, “My friends look worried & say/ nothing.” All of us could be the “nowheres,” including the speaker’s friends, who are made uncomfortable by the speaker’s nihilism, and at times, suicidal musings. It continues, “… what I’m trying to say is I don’t want/ a body at all. What I want is I want an existence without/ the scarring of unfinished things…” It is unclear whether the speaker believes living without a body would bring death or somehow, more life. This poem is not the lament of a speaker who is pained by their body’s size, shape, or color, but rather wishes that the body does not exist at all, because the speaker is jealous of simpler existences and temperaments. This poem can be called a descendent of “Tulips” (1961), one of Plath’s most loved poems, which goes:

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free—
The peacefulness is so big, it dazes you

For Winters and Plath, becoming empty is desirable, while being unnoticed is paradoxically beneficial and annihilating. Winters writes, “I/ don’t want these ankles that will not stop choosing grief.” Similarly, Plath says, “Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.” Both poets are in pain due to the violence of the ordinary. Winters’ friends are “soon distracted” and Plath’s nurses “pass and pass, they are no trouble/ They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,” which is to say, they are also busy and distracted.

It makes sense that Winters’ work echoes backwards to Plath’s. Like many writers who have suffered from mental illnesses, Winters reveres Plath’s writing. In Winters’ TedX Talk, she said that after she was first diagnosed, the words of Plath (and Hemingway) saved her life. She felt understood by these writers in a way that she didn’t by the actual people in her vicinity. At one heartbreaking point, she says, “I chose this life so many times, only for the sake of a single poem.” Many of the poems in Portrait reflect this same sentiment that poetry is enough. Irish writer Nuala O Faolain uttered something similar, “If there was nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.”

Some of the collection’s strongest poems, like “Serenade to Surrender” and “Alternate Names for Gay Girls after Danez Smith” are more daring and idiosyncratic in form and context. Particularly, the latter poem is funny with dark humor. It is a list poem, a list of (you guessed it) alternative names for gay girls, like “19. no, Grandma, her. I said it’s a her” and “10. have you found a nice boy to settle down with yet?” It’s difficult to tell if Winters’ speaker is being outright cheeky and poking fun at hetero-normativity, or if these conversations are difficult burdens for her. Both might be true at different times. She leaves this up for our interpretation. There are other lines that are darker and flash back to themes of self-harm and hopelessness, like “2. Greyhound bus bound for nowhere” and “9. Freshly-washed corpse.” Winters’ ability to mix the extraordinary unjust “9. Freshly-washed corpse” with more self-aggrandizing lines such as “20. Holy” and “7. Artemis” works well because it touches on the complexities of being any kind of minority or oppressed individual in society. Even if the reader is not gay, these extremes are relatable because they suggest that there is a power inside being powerless. Utilizing the strategy of synonymy, the poem is a list of either histories or futures of gay girls. Either reading is satisfying.

In “July,” one of the final poems, Winters’ temperament changes. The speaker becomes more grateful. She uses the word “bless” twelve times in the poem to bestow blessings on things she is thankful for, including “Bless every poem.” This poem can feel ingenuous, though it is congruent with Winters’ sincerity. Portrait’s cover illustration (by Lim Charlotte) depicts a mass of half-supernova, half-bodily entanglement. The twisted figures in the chaos have a blushy resemblance to figures in an Egon Schiele painting. Like Winters’ poetry, it has a cosmic and naturalistic essence. From some angles, it looks like a rose, and from other angles, it is an orgy of bodies. Like many of the themes in this book, the cover can feel hopeless or beautiful. The thin narrative arc running through Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing does not amount to anything resembling prose poetry or narrative conclusion, though, readers will feel that there is a course the speaker is on. The ending poem “Hands” is lovely and rises to postmodern complexity. Its fourth stanza is two words in present tense: "They forgive." Thus Winters tells us that the same hands that continue to commit violence will also absolve us and deliver us from harm.


Samantha Neugebauer is an Instructor at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is on the editorial board of the Philadelphia literary magazine Painted Bride Quarterly and a contributor and co-producer of the podcast Slush Pile. Samantha has presented on experiential learning, English monolingualism in higher education, and first-year student experiences throughout the world, most recently in Beirut, Lebanon. She has poetry and stories in The Offing, Columbia Journal, and other places.