Book Description
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.
TAYLOR BYAS is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor.
Praise For This Book
An Audacious Book Club PickMs., A Best Poetry of the Year
Our Culture Magazine, A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
"A careful examination of the ways we view others—whether through painting, films, sculpture, and photographs—and how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity. Byas offers a corrective of some of art’s most famous depictions of womanhood, which in turn creates a new world of possibility for her subjects. Stunning in scale and ensnaring in its lyricism, Byas remains at the top of her game in Resting Bitch Face." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"What we see in something as superficial (and alluring) as a face is a throughline Byas tugs and torques through her new collection, in sections named after painting terms ('Canvas,' 'Gesso,' 'Dry Down'), in responses to canonical artworks ('Well Damn, Picasso') and meditations sparked by museum- and moviegoing. Byas’s pantoums, duplexes, and sonnet sequences flaunt a rigorous formalism, but she may be even better at decomposing than at composing: blacking out and recontextualizing her own polished words, refuting her poems with contrasting poems packed into footnotes, Byas scrutinizes the multiple facets of every face." —Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
"This astute and ingenious collection shines." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Striking . . . Ranging from bildungsroman-esque, self-image-themed poems to elegant verses in conversation with art, film, poetry, photography, and historical figures, these works consider the perspective of muse and artist, observer and observed . . . Byas deploys strong, startling wordplay and clever imagery . . . A thought-provoking, gracefully executed collection.” —Booklist (starred review)
