Resting Bitch Face

An Audacious Book Club Pick

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

Resting Bitch Faceis 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 asThe Joker,WandaVision, andLast Tango in Paris.

Ultimately, while watching lies at the crux of this collections poetic concerns, the goal of the speaker is to query her own self, rendering these poems as invitations for readers to question their own.

Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collectionI Done Clicked My Heels Three Timeswon the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor.

• Publisher: Soft Skull
  
• Publish Date: August 26, 2025
  
• Pages: 256
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Paperback
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781593767877
  
• Dimensions: 8.3 X 5.2 X 0.0 inches | 0.8 pounds
  
• BISAC Categories: Poetry