Who Gets to Look? Taylor Byas Reclaims the Black Female Image in Resting Bitch Face

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being watched before you have been heard. A Black woman can enter a room carrying no anger at all and still find her face interpreted, her body evaluated, and her silence turned into evidence. In Resting Bitch Face, poet Taylor Byas examines the distance between the Black woman who exists and the version of her created by someone else’s gaze.

Published by Soft Skull Press, the collection uses paintings, photographs, sculpture, film, and popular culture to explore how Black women have been observed, displayed, desired, criticized, and misunderstood. Byas approaches art as both a source of beauty and a record of power. Every portrait has someone behind the canvas deciding what the audience should see, and every camera carries the possibility of turning a living person into an object.

The title immediately confronts one of the most common ways women are disciplined through language. “Resting bitch face” is usually treated as a joke, but the phrase carries an accusation. It suggests that a woman’s natural expression should remain pleasant, welcoming, and available for public approval. For Black women, that demand is complicated further by stereotypes that label confidence as aggression, boundaries as hostility, and self-possession as arrogance.

Byas takes that familiar phrase and returns control of the image to the woman wearing the face. Throughout the collection, the observed Black woman becomes the observer. She studies the frame surrounding her, questions the intentions of the person looking, and refuses to remain still for anyone else’s interpretation.

The poems move between lyric poetry and prose, allowing Byas to blend personal reflection with art and film criticism. That shifting form strengthens the collection because the subject cannot be contained by a single approach. Some experiences arrive as images. Others unfold through memory, cultural analysis, desire, shame, anger, and tenderness. Byas gives each one the amount of space it requires.

Readers looking for a collection built around easy declarations may find themselves challenged by the book’s layered references and formal experimentation. Byas often asks the reader to sit with an image and consider who created it, whose desires shaped it, and what remains outside the frame. The poems reward attention, especially when read slowly enough to notice how the collection moves between the woman as artwork, artist, audience, and unwilling spectacle.

The emotional force of Resting Bitch Face comes from its recognition that being seen does not always mean being known. Visibility can become another kind of confinement when the person looking has already decided what they expect to find. Black women are frequently made hypervisible while their interior lives remain ignored. Byas exposes that contradiction without flattening Black womanhood into permanent suffering.

Beauty, pleasure, intimacy, humor, and self-recognition remain present throughout the collection. The poems create room for the Black female body to exist beyond public judgment and cultural explanation. Byas writes toward a freedom that includes the right to be complicated, sensual, guarded, joyful, wounded, and unfinished.

Resting Bitch Face is an ambitious collection from a poet whose work deserves wider attention. Taylor Byas understands that reclaiming an image requires more than stepping in front of the camera. It requires questioning who built the frame, who benefits from the angle, and who has been allowed to control the story.

For readers interested in poetry that engages Black womanhood, visual culture, art, and the politics of perception, this collection offers a sharp and necessary examination of what it means to live under observation while fighting to remain fully yourself.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 ink pens

Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas was published by Soft Skull Press on August 26, 2025.