Resting Bitch Face, Taylor Byas
Resting Bitch Face, Taylor Byas
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Resting Bitch Face
Poems

Author: Taylor Byas

Narrator: Taylor Byas

Unabridged: 2 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/26/2025


Synopsis

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story

Resting Bitch Face is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of "watching" throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.

From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris.

About Taylor Byas

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the first-place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter and her debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume X: Alabama.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Allana on September 08, 2025

3.5 "Sculpture Study Number 1 Brooklyn, New York// A woman's real first lesson about her body is nothing // To write home about. // The second lesson, one of colonization." Taylor Byas' "Resting Bitch Face" explores living under the male gaze. I thought the most effective parts were the Sculpture Studi......more

Goodreads review by Abigail on September 02, 2025

No one is doing form in the 21st century like Dr. Byas. This collection, as with every one of her collections before it, left me walking away with knowledge of a new form & inspired to write. <3......more

Goodreads review by Sam on July 22, 2025

!!! My goodness, I am so in love with Taylor Byas’ prose. This is my second interaction with her perfectly crafted poetry collections, and I was just hooked from the very beginning. Her capability to capture the very essence of longing, disgust, and heartache had me rolling in an empathetic fever. T......more

Goodreads review by Siri on May 31, 2025

Got to read the galley - Unrelenting in its gaze, upon men, in response to art, towards one’s self. These poems feel empowered as much from what they include as to what they leave out.......more

Goodreads review by Lana on August 23, 2025

*Read through NetGalley* I don’t normally read poetry, but this book was still really digestible and enjoyable for someone who isn’t a big poetry reader. It didn’t feel like the author was writing to sound above a certain audience, but instead made the work feel relatable to everyone. I really enjoyed......more