RESTING BITCH FACE by Taylor Byas

Book Review & Interview by Margot Douaihy

Taylor Byas’s poetry is emulsion—alive, startling, photosensitive, ready to burn through paper and print an image in the mind’s eye. Her capacious questioning, sharp wit, and technical precision have established her as one of America’s leading poetic voices, and her new collection reveals a writer at the very top of her craft. “Resting Bitch Face” (Soft Skull Press, 2025) offers a daring poetics of resistance with exhilarating, scalpel-sharp, erudite, and deeply felt poems that decenter “the gaze” to examine seeing and unseeing through a Black feminist lens.

The book confidently engages paradoxes of the visual and visual artists like Nan Goldin, Carrie Mae Weems, and Picasso, in a discourse that needs to be upended, destabilized by subject-positions “of perspective. Or speed. / Like the coal mine rolling upward to greet me.” The gambit promised by the title delivers. Byas interrogates the resting bitch face, vivisects it, deranges it, rearranges it, and celebrates it. Turns the misogynistic neologism into a site of agency. The titular poem had me practicing my own RBF in the mirror until it was ready to cut a jugular. Or at least say screw you to the dude on the rail trail who told me to smile. Hard pass.

Byas also shows how formal dexterity nourishes deeper philosophical aims. The impressive range of formal engagements (tensile tercets, ekphrasis, iambic adjacent) and cinematic prose poetry, vivifies what bell hooks theorized as the oppositional gaze—the deliberate act of looking back—squarely, unsparingly—into the eye of the surveiller, the trick mirror. The arc of the book shifts “resting” from passive to active in lyric refusals to be objectified, commodified, consumed.

Poem to poem, the collection pulses with temporal slippage and psychic dislocation: “disorientation is really a moment / of clarity, me switchblading / into a past life.” Which, same. Every element in the lexical field has its own line of inquiry. In “The Violence of Rain,” for instance, the period—what Ellen Bryant Voight calls a “discreet structure”—fractures the lyric line and spatial coherence, moving beyond grammatical mimesis into emotionally revelatory territory. 

And underneath Byas’s controlled tonal landscape and precision enjambment—dizzying caesuras and counterfactuals—these poems ache. They ache with vulnerability, relief, and power. They ache like bodies do after breaking down a door. The dialectic of pain and pleasure, of resistance and desire (“the sharpest elastic snap”) feels so tender and human: “Between us, a silent certainty / chugging through static—we are always holding each other in the dark.”

These poems stare at you and invite you to stare back. They dare you to look again. And you will. You’ll look again. And again and again.

Margot Douaihy: Just call me Zero Chill here because this is the best poetry collection I’ve read in ten years. I can’t wait to put this on my syllabus. This book was a delicious relief for me to read on every level. So, congratulations on an incredible work of art. 

Taylor Byas: Thank you. Really. Thank you. [laughs]

MD: This will be an interview of words, but can we trade resting bitch faces right now? [Margot and Taylor trade RFBs.] Perfect. Yours is exceptional. 

TB: Yours is great.

MD: I adore the title, Resting Bitch Face—it’s an invitation, it’s an incantation. It gives readers an immediate and specific parlance, a point of view, and worldview. It’s also tongue in cheek and very witty. Incisive, too, because I’ve never heard “resting bitch face” used for men. What pulled you to this phrase as your book’s title and emotional core?

TB: What pulled me towards it as the book's title is actually the titular poem in the collection. The first iteration of this book was my dissertation and it had a completely different title, but the poem “Resting Bitch Face” was still very much the center of the book.

The inspiration for that poem came during the height of the pandemic when masks were mandated. One of the things I realized—one of the very few silver linings of that time—was, oh, men have stopped bothering me and have stopped asking me to smile because they can't see half of my face. Once that occurred to me, there was sort of no going back.

“Resting Bitch Face,” the poem, was inspired by that idea of our faces being something that is constantly policed, constantly observed and managed. It is very gendered. No one questions men for walking around looking angry and serious all the time—that’s expected of them—but we are supposed to be smiling and welcoming and inviting. That poem was central to the book because the project is about these severely gendered expectations of how women and femme bodies are expected to exist in the world.

When we were selling it to Soft Skull, we changed the title from the original because we felt like “Resting Bitch Face” was actually the better title. It is very tongue in cheek, witty, catchy. It immediately places the reader in a specific emotional space. I imagine people who’ve had experience with that phrase or who that phrase has been weaponized against have a specific emotional response. I wanted to welcome the range of those responses into the book.

MD: It’s just perfect. And there is a primacy in the book of the value of interrogating who is looking, how are we looking, how are we seeing. In the poem “Discomfort at the MoMA,” we see a Black woman noting “the cooler tension she feels” while observing art alongside white viewers. It's a brilliant layering of watching, surveillance, and exigent questions of authenticity and access. How does the museum space function as a sanctuary for exploring art (and perhaps beauty?) and site of surveillance?

TB: If we go back to the beginnings of how this book formed, I originally set out to write an ekphrastic chapbook. A lot of those ekphrastic poems ended up in “Resting Bitch Face” because I realized I had way more to say.

I wrote a poem called “Tea in the Museum,” where the speaker and another person are running through the museum, playing around, giggling at other people’s observations, and then they encounter a sculpture that ruins their experience because they realize it’s ultimately a depiction of rape. That poem unlocked the range of emotional experience that happens in the space of the museum.

More recently I went to a museum, and it was very empty. What I experienced was the eeriness of being in an art museum as a Black woman—I can go through big portions of art museums and not see anything or any portrait that looks like me. And yet all of these white faces are looking back at me all the time. You’re standing in the middle of these rooms of portraits and you're watching, but the art is also watching you in a very eerie way. And that also feels like being watched by the problematic artists who made the art.

There are now these historical layers of watching. The book represents what is now my art museum experience, and it is troubled by all of the layers of watching and being observed. Whether that’s being observed by the art or other people, or me also intruding in my own ways and watching other people. It’s so interesting that all these things are happening in the exact same temporal field.

MD: You have such an impressive range of forms—the burning haibun, ekphrasis, tight tercets, the sonnet, and more. Nothing feels shoehorned in, and in your hands, “form” feels like a tool of liberation rather than conformity. Especially, I loved this take on the sonnet with “Sonnet for My Dating Life.” It contains and then explodes with immediate questions of intimacy that feel real and now, yet the sonnet is a centuries-old artifact, a received form, a message of production from the past, with a set of expectations. How do you view forms? As constraints or invitations? Both?

TB: A lot of my foundational thinking about form is influenced by how I want form to be taught. I think about my own formal education and how I came to understand form. I always say I feel like I could have latched onto these things a lot faster if I had been encountering forms populated with stories that were familiar to me, with language that was familiar to me, and inspiring to me.

I think about this generation of students now who are increasingly distracted, whose attention spans are going to hell in a handbasket. There is a particular appeal when we can encounter forms and see ourselves and see our lives reflected back to us—there’s a different engagement. I set out to write forms that do that kind of work because it's important to me as an educator. It's also the work of decolonizing the canon.

Very specific to this collection, a lot of what this book does is talk back to history. It’s talking back to historical art and museums, to these artists. My approach to forms is that as well—talking back to the traditional version of the form in a way that is contemporary. It's having a conversation with Shakespeare in my language. It's an attempt to have a conversation with the form, to interrupt that canon, but to also be mindful of how form can be a better access point to students.

MD: Your sonics are stellar. There’s sometimes a foregrounded sense of meter, stresses, and unstresses, and other times it’s almost that Frost “sound of sense”—drips of musicality bleeding under the door. What are some of the poems in this collection that led with sound?

TB: When I’m thinking about sonics and sound, I’m thinking of Patricia Smith’s “Motown Crown”—that’s the example when it comes to how sound can play into the sonnet. The poems that started from sound are probably more of the prose poems. Because prose poems aren’t lineated, there are other strategies you have to lean on to create surprise or that specific reader experience. Sound is often something I turn to.

“They call the party the ‘set’ because” is a poem that definitely led with sound: 

“During the pregame, the liquor lends you a lens, and every look becomes a slow pan, zoom in. Your homegirl bruises her new Revlon lipstick onto the neck of a bottle of Henny. Your mascara smudges under your eyes already, and why can’t we just begin where we know the night will end? During the car ride, your girls make big plans for anonymous hands to shake something loose in them.”

MD: Phenom. Just… [Margot clapping and jumping up and down]

TB: I do an exercise where you reverse engineer—you think about the environment of the scene you’re trying to create. I was thinking about this environment that’s smoky, there’s liquid everywhere. The letter S was a sound that felt representative of the environment.

I typically will overwrite sonics and sound, and then work to dial it back. The burning haibun is another one: “You caught the sacred side at the purgatory between a woman's interest and disgust”—you hear those S sounds coming in again. It’s a lot of the prose poems where I lead with sound because without enjambment and line breaks, I’m using sound to pull the reader through. 

MD: I’m mesmerized by “My Friend Says Steven Spielberg Is Invited to the Cookout.” Could you take us through the lifecycle of this poem? 

TB: The movie The Color Purple is one of my comfort movies that I cycle through—which is interesting because it’s a lot, as a movie, but it’s one I grew up watching with family. We’ve woven language from the movie into our familial language. I read the book first long ago, then reread it during my PhD exams when I was thinking about poetic strategies of resistance in Black women's poetry.

The title started from a conversation with friends about the difference between books and their movies and how we get robbed when things are missing in the movie adaptation. “The Color Purple” came up, and I was so passionate about the fact that we don’t really get a full picture of Celie and Mister's relationship in the movie. In the book, he actually comes to realize she’s a lesbian and they form a friendship—it is very different.

We got to talking about Celie and Shug’s relationship and how in the movie it’s this one chaste moment where they finally kiss and then the camera just turns away. It was that conversation, combined with another poem in the book about the director being in control and who's behind the camera and how they decide what we get to look at and what we don’t. A bridge formed between that poem and me thinking about that moment where Spielberg robbed us of what really happened by turning the camera away.

MD: The architecture of the book—e.g., Canvas, Gesso, Signature—clues us in to process, that there will be an emphasis on process. Is this collection itself an ars poetica for you?

TB: This book absolutely was a process, and very different from my first book. I had my own question: this collection is about photography and film as well, so why did I go with painting to organize the book? Because it is about process. This book happened in layers for me, too, the way a painting often has to come to life.

My PhD exams were the priming—priming the canvas. The dissertation year was one layer of the book. After we sold the book, I ended up rewriting a third of it. The writing of those poems after I'd gotten out of the program and my mind became my own again was very much informed by reading I was able to do for enjoyment. That was another layer.

The signature—that very last poem—was literally the last poem written and added right at the final deadline. When I wrote that last poem, I was like, this is the last poem I will write for this project, and everything after this will be for something different. I felt very sure about that.

I think this book is very much interested in the work of criticism. I was very much in academia while doing this writing and thinking about theory. I wanted to expand the possibilities of what criticism can look like. It can start from the personal but pull in all these different layers. The painting structure was the best to hold all of that.

MD: The collection grapples with questions of authenticity in seeing and being seen. In our current moment of social media performances and avatars, filters and fillers, how do you navigate tensions between authentic self-expression and self-protection?

TB: A lot of the self-protection in the book comes in the form of persona. There were times I wanted to grapple with things, but grappling with them through an “I” felt too uncomfortable, too vulnerable. Having had a first book out, I understand there’s a familiarity people encounter when they read your work—they feel like they know you as a person, not as the author. There was perhaps a subconscious anxiety around that, which might have fueled some of the persona.

This book is very intimate in a way that invites readers to stand in rooms, to stand in scenes and really be present and watch something. I didn't necessarily want a reader to always feel like they're watching me as Taylor the person.

In terms of outward-facing persona and social media, I think you have to be selective about what you engage with and how you engage. I’ve seen well-meaning people try to engage in conversations and see those things twisted out of proportion. I'm very careful and mindful of what I engage with on social media. I pick my battles. Sometimes you just have to let people sit in their own discomfort.

Just because I've written a book doesn’t mean anyone is entitled to anything more than I'm willing to share. You have to protect yourself, protect your emotional and mental wellbeing. The best way to do that is to be more selective.

MD: Between AI, the gutting of the NEA, and a tyrannical, racist government essentially waging war on diversity and, seemingly, free expression, it can feel scary and hard to be in the arts and humanities. Do you have any advice for people in the arts, for poets specifically, who might be feeling alone, or struggling right now? 

TB: One of the things I fight with is feeling like, of all the things happening in the world, art doesn't feel like the important thing to be focusing on right now. But to counter that: what we create—whether it's the art or poetry we're writing, the stories we're writing—are the counter narratives to what they are going to say about this time in history. They’re already trying to rewrite and erase in real time. Not only is this work important, but it’s necessary because it's the part that will help tell the full and true story of what this time in history is.

Even for those just coming to their art or poetry, there's this idea that if you’re writing poems, they have to be capital-P Poems about something important or outside of the self. I want to say that these histories that start from the personal and then move to something universal—that build the bridge between ourselves and someone else—are equally important, if not more important, than the glossy textbooks we look at in classrooms.

These are the histories that remind us we are not alone, that give us the energy to fight back and be activists and do the work in the real world that we need to do outside of the art. The art can energize us, we can remind each other of the importance of the work and that we are not alone in that work. That is necessary work. So in the face of feeling like it’s not important, in the face of feeling like your own everyday existence and stories are not important—they’re not only important but necessary, so that we can do the work together.

MD:  An exceptional way to close this out (and start anew). Thank you so much.