It’s rare to encounter a collection that doesn’t just demand your attention—but refuses to let you look away. Resting Bitch Face is that kind of book. With razor-sharp clarity and an unwavering gaze, Taylor Byas crafts poems that move between memory, body, grief, and rage with both precision and heart. These are poems that speak back, that refuse to be still, that hold a mirror up to the violence of gaze, gender, and silence—and then shatter that mirror into something newly made.
Throughout this collection, Byas makes space for Black women’s anger, desire, tenderness, and survival. From sculpture studies and ekphrastic meditations to unflinching narratives of harm and reclamation, her work blurs the boundary between self and scene, always insisting on complexity. In this conversation, we talk about visibility, the politics of form, and what it means to write toward power when the world tries to write you out.
Darius Phelps: In “Essay on Shuttering,” you write, “All little Black girls have been told to change for male company, have been aged with the knowledge of a man’s wanting.” How did you approach crafting these layered moments of recognition and violation, and what role does poetic form play in shaping that tension?
Taylor Byas: The roots of this book trace back to my doctoral research. My dissertation examined poetic strategies of resistance among Black women poets—how we articulate survival through form. That academic foundation deeply shaped this project, but I wanted to push beyond what is typically recognized as theory or criticism. I wanted the book to live in a space where the personal is central, because I believe those intimate moments—of violation, of witnessing, of resilience—are as worthy of study as any canonical text. Formally, that meant letting the poems stretch and hold multiple truths, allowing critique and confession to coexist.
DP: You powerfully weave visual art and photography into the poetic with this collection. What does the visual offer your poetic process, and how does the camera—literal and metaphorical—function in your understanding of self and surveillance?
TB: The visual—especially the idea of the camera—is a huge influence. Much of the book leans into prose poetry, and I often imagine the prose poem as a kind of cinematic frame. I think of the reader as a camera: Where am I directing the gaze? What are we zooming in or cutting away from? It’s about control—who gets to look, who is being looked at—and the tension between intrusion and intimacy. This is a book about being watched, yes, but also about watching back. I want readers to feel that unease. To ask themselves: What am I complicit in? What am I drawn to? Why?
3. There is a recurring thread of reclaiming power in spaces that have traditionally objectified or silenced Black women. How do you see Resting Bitch Face in conversation with other Black feminist texts or thinkers—perhaps those cited in your epigraphs?
TB: Absolutely. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, June Jordan—those voices are in the marrow of this book. There are erotic moments in the collection, some complicated by violence, but others that begin to move toward safety and autonomy. I also wanted this book to enter conversations where Black women’s artistic work has been excluded. Take the museum, for example—an institution of learning that often renders us invisible. Through the ekphrastic poems, I imagine the speaker as someone walking through that space loudly, interrupting the quiet reverence. She’s not asking permission to belong. She’s already there.
DP: In many of the poems in this collection, you confront the ways women’s trauma is both portrayed and consumed. Can you speak to how you hold space for rage and vulnerability in your work, particularly when negotiating the line between bearing witness and protecting the self?
TB: That was one of the hardest parts of writing this book. There were poems I couldn’t write in the first person—they felt too raw. So I created distance. I used third-person narration, I built personas. It was a form of self-protection, but also a craft decision. That distance gave me room to say what needed to be said without feeling like I was bearing everything. In teaching, I now use that strategy with students: if it feels too close, create a character. Write through the art. Ekphrasis, in that way, lets the reader look with me instead of at me. It’s a shared confrontation.
DP: Your title itself is a reclamation—bold, confrontational, and laced with cultural critique. What does “resting bitch face” mean to you now, and how does the act of naming shape your poetic resistance, particularly as it relates to Black womanhood and visibility?
TB: I love that question. “Resting bitch face” has always been about control—about how women are told to shrink, to smile, to be palatable. But now? It feels like a verb. To bitch face is to resist. It’s to stand, unmoved, in the face of erasure. To say: I’m still here. Still telling my stories. Still raising hell. In this political moment, where people are actively trying to silence marginalized voices, resting bitch face becomes an act of refusal. Of presence. Of saying, “I’m not here for your comfort. I’m here for the truth.”
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of My God’s Been Silent (2026)
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary.