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.”
2021 Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Contest Winner Topaz Winters' third poetry collection spans three countries & three generations. In a far-reaching & deftly woven series of ars poeticas, Winters questions the boundary between the things we inherit & those we owe. Topaz arrives at the grave of the American dream, & unspools the enormous grace & guilt of being loved. So, Stranger stands as a fixed mark between the shifting histories & futures of being a daughter, being an artist, & being an immigrant. If its reader begins as a stranger, they end as part of a lineage: one both of grief & glory, of distance & arrival.
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."
From a pair of "New York Times"-bestselling authors comes an in-depth account of the manhunt for Joran van der Sloot, a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba and, five years later, the murder of a young woman in Peru.
"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--
"Gripping . . . Cutter Wood subverts all our expectations for the true crime genre.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering When a stolen car is recovered on the Gulf Coast of Florida, it sets off a search for a missing woman, local motel owner Sabine Musil-Buehler. Three men are named persons of interest—her husband, her boyfriend, and the man who stole the car. Then the motel is set on fire; her boyfriend flees the county; and detectives begin digging on the beach of Anna Maria Island. Author Cutter Wood was a guest at Musil-Buehler’s motel as the search for her gained momentum. Driven by his own need to understand how a relationship could spin to pieces in such a fatal fashion, he began to talk with many of the people living on Anna Maria, and then with the detectives, and finally with the man presumed to be the murderer. But there was only so much that interviews and transcripts could reveal. In trying to understand how we treat those we love, this book, like Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood, tells a story that exists outside documentary evidence. Wood carries the investigation of Sabine’s murder beyond the facts of the case and into his own life, crafting a tale about the dark conflicts at the heart of every relationship.
NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year A “chilling but fascinating portrait” of a serial killer, and “a must-read for true crime fans” who enjoyed My Dark Places, The Stranger Beside Me, or I’ll Be Gone In the Dark (Buzzfeed) One of Argentina’s most innovative writers brings to life the story of a teenager who murdered 4 taxi drivers in 1982 Buenos Aires—without any apparent motive. Over the course of one ghastly week in September 1982, the bodies of 4 taxi drivers were found in Buenos Aires, each murder carried out with the same cold precision. The assailant: a 19–year–old boy, odd and taciturn, who gave the impression of being completely sane. But the crimes themselves were not: 4 murders, as exact as they were senseless. More than 30 years later, Argentine author Carlos Busqued began visiting Ricardo Melogno, the serial killer, in prison. Their conversations return to the nebulous era of the crimes and a story full of missing pieces. The result is a book at once hypnotic and unnerving, constructed from forensic documents, newspaper clippings, and interviews with Melogno himself. Without imposing judgment, Busqued allows for the killer to describe his way of retreating from the world and to explain his crimes as best he can. In his own words, Melogno recalls a visit from Pope Francis, grim depictions of daily life in prison, and childhood remembrances of an unloving mother who drove her son to Brazil to study witchcraft. As these conversations progress, the focus slowly shifts from the crimes themselves, to Melogno’s mistreatment and misdiagnosis while in prison, to his current fate: incarcerated in perpetuity despite having served his full sentence. Using these personal interviews, alongside forensic documents and newspaper clippings, Busqued crafted Magnetized, a captivating story about one man’s crimes, and a meditation on how one chooses to inhabit the world, or to become absent from it.
Cameron Awkward Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.
2018 Button Poetry Prize Winner In Keep This To Yourself, grief is a violent machine, with each new poem Kerrin McCadden unscrews every bolt of this grief until it falls apart. Cutting through the complex layers of loss she writes about how bereavement moves through her family like a sickness. What good is silence in the face of trauma? McCadden plunges into the truth, and shows us the world on the other side.
