Resting Bitch Face
Poems
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- $12.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The penetrating latest from Byas (I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times) addresses the conflict between the observer and the observed. Through poems, essays, and other hybrid forms that engage with photography, painting, film, and television, Byas explores the power of the image to restrict and control Black women. In "Essay on Shuttering," the speaker describes the gendered dynamics of a photo shoot in eerie, mechanical terms: "He who holds the camera has the say. The photographer says smile and I obey. He motions how he wants me to shift my body and my body follows. Under the bright studio lights of the photo shoot, I begin to sweat—my body's only rebellion." Other entries consider the consequences of a society that silently condones the objectification of the Black female body. In "Sculpture Study #1," a man sexually assaults a woman on her way to the subway, prompting the speaker to ask, "What are we allowed to really be when we hurt in public: human or statue?" An aura of unease permeates these poems as they ruminate on the false fixity of the image: "I still couldn't become myself." This astute and ingenious collection shines.
