Resting Bitch Face: Poems by Taylor Byas

Resting Bitch Face: Poems

$16.95
$16.95
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Resting Bitch Face: Poems by Taylor Byas
  • Resting Bitch Face: Poems by Taylor Byas
Resting Bitch Face: Poems

Soft Skull

Resting Bitch Face: Poems

by Taylor Byas

$16.95
$16.95
In stock
An Audacious Book Club Pick

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.
Book Details
Publisher:
Soft Skull
ISBN:
9781593767877
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
256
Authors:
Taylor Byas
Published Date:
2025-08-26
Language:
English
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African American & Black All Poetry Women Authors

About Taylor Byas

Taylor Byas won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award for I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. The same collection took the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry and the 2024 Ohio Book Award in Poetry, and was a 2024 BCALA Best Poetry Honor Book. Resting Bitch Face, which followed from Soft Skull in 2025, was a 2026 Ohio Book Award finalist. She grew up in Chicago and lives in Cincinnati. She earned a BA and an MA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati. She is essays editor at The Rumpus.

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