Note: This transcription is edited to facilitate the reading experience. To see every word uttered in this recording, please click the “Transcript” button for captioning you can follow :) DeeSoul Carson: And it was just like, what a crazy thing to say! You know, you’re a professor of poetry at this big institution and you’re just like, people of color aren’t doing sonnets?!?! They aren’t doing sonnets?!?! Taylor Byas: Yeah, like just say, you don’t read. Just say that. DC: Right! Just say that. I would have respected that answer. I won’t like it, but I respect that. TB: Right. I might email you some recommendations after class, but okay! Yeah! DC: But you’re like, what am I going to do? I get it. I also have the things that I prefer. But she was just like, they don’t write them. TB: Like alright, well — DC: Wrong answer, fo’head, let’s try that one again! [The poets laugh and the intro music plays] DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is Eponymous, an extension of the O, Word? podcast that is interested in poets, their collections, their title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Resting B***h Face by Dr. Taylor Byas. Dr. Taylor Byas, PhD, edits for The Rumpus, Jack Legg Press, Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and 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, among others. Her second full-length, Resting B***h Face (2025), which we’ll be discussing today, is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary. Taylor, hello! TB: Hello, hello. DC: How are we doing? TB: I’m wonderful. Happy to be here. How are you? DC: I’m doing great. I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m super appreciative. Your new book is in the world now. How do you feel? TB: It’s like, exactly a month now, maybe two days past a month, and it has been good. It’s interesting because the first book came out almost exactly two years ago. And, you know, I had no expectations for the first book. And somehow, interestingly, I’m, like, simultaneously more nervous about this one. But then I also have these moments where I feel kind of completely detached to it. And I think that’s a symptom more so of just the state of the world more than anything else. And maybe things just feeling not as important as maybe they would if we were in a better moment. DC: Yeah, I mean, I’m super excited about it. I finished reading it yesterday. I was trying to prepare for this interview. And I think it’s just so great. I understand what you’re saying, like the second book is kind of its own thing. Like there’s that energy around the first book, you’re like “the debut, now it’s out,” then it’s like, “oh, I have to do that… again.” Is that kind of the sensation you had while you were putting it together? TB: It is. You know, I think one thing that maybe people didn’t really tell me was… you know for a lot of people — unless you have just won like a ton of huge awards, and you’re someone who just has a lot of eyes on you — it’s very easy for people’s second and, you know, third, fourth books to kind of like not get the same attention as the debut as well. DC: Yeah. A lot of hype around a debut. TB: Yeah, yeah, a lot of hype around a debut and then it’s just, there’s just a difference with that second book, and I’m very fortunate that there was still some really great publicity around Resting B***h Face but, for example, we didn’t get any blurbs for the second book. Like, we sent out blurb requests we didn’t get any blurbs for Resting B***h Face, and they were like “this is actually something that’s pretty common with second books,” which I didn’t know. And so I just think it’s so interesting that there are things that happen the second go-round that no one really kinda tells you, that you aren’t really prepared for. And I know now it’s not personal, like I know those people that we asked were just busy and had 10,000 things to do but you know sometimes you do take a little personally and your feelings do get hurt and you do feel... DC: I mean, it’s your baby. How could you not? TB: You know, it’s my baby. Right. And of course, you know, no one cares about it likely more than I do, and that’s its own thing. But there is a way that I think you have to reshape your expectations for a book after the debut, for sure. DC: That’s fair. I never even thought about, like what that… ‘cause in my head, I keep tabs. I’m like, “okay, I want this person to talk in the second book, this person talking in the third book,” but that’s really actually, really eye opening. So given that this is Eponymous, I did want to start with the title. And I’m curious, was Resting B***h Face always, like, did you always know that’s what it was gonna be? Or were there like other titles that you were also kinda juggling? TB: So the first version of this book was my dissertation. And Resting B***h Face absolutely was not the title. DC: [Laughing] That’s not what you put to the — to the people at the PhD? TB: — That’s nottttt what I put on there. Don’t go look it up y’all. It’s a different title on the dissertation. The title for the dissertation, if I remember correctly, was Corrupt[i]on and then the “I” was in parentheses because I do think that there is something in the collection about the I, that it kind of emerges or kind of breaks out of this mold and moves towards a more autonomous being. And so that was actually the title. Then we sold it to Soft Skull. And that’s actually when we changed the title. And I was so happy that they were like “Resting B***h Face is it” because I was kind of like, “oh, I don’t know how the press would feel about, you know, having this curse word in the title. If they’re kind of like, oh, that’s too much.” They were like “Resting B***h Face is the title.” So it actually didn’t change until we had gotten to the Soft Skull and talked about it with them, yeah. DC: Speaking of that I that you’re talking about, your eponymous poem “Resting B***h Face,” kind of speaks a bit to this phenomena of both being observed and the observer. And I’m wondering if you could speak to more of how you feel this poem represents the collection as a whole. TB: So, that poem came into being because of the height of the pandemic when masks were like, heavily mandated everywhere, I like, it occurred to me that men had stopped telling me to smile because I couldn’t police my face because I couldn’t see it. And so then I got to thinking about this way women are not only observed, not only constantly under surveillance, but all of the different ways that we are expected to appear a certain way, expected to behave a certain way, how even as we’re going about our days, minding our business — as we’re deep in our thoughts, as we’re stressed, as we’re worried — we’re expected to kind of be approachable and welcoming and warm and inviting. And interestingly enough, the phrase, “resting b***h face” is this thing that gets weaponized and thrown at you if you don’t appear that way. It’s like, you know, this insult. So I, the poem, kind of confronts that gaze, which is something that I wanted this book to do. I wanted this book to be the stare down, like, that stares back at the, sort of, watcher until they back down ,sort of thing. I wanted “resting b***h face” to go from this insult to this kind of act of resistance, like yes you’ve called out my resting b***h face and now I’m going to look even meaner in your face until you leave me the hell alone, type of thing. And I think the book is very much engaged in a similar sort of movement. It definitely goes from being watched, poems in which there is a lot of watching happening — the speaker is being watched, the speaker finds themselves in these scenes where they also find themselves being watched. And then, as the book progresses, the speaker emerges more and more, “Resting B***h Face” is kind of, like, right at the center of the book. It’s kind of like a hinge point. After that poem, you see the speaker kind of getting more ballsy, and getting more empowered to speak in similar ways. [Transitional music plays] DC: There’s definitely this emphasis in the book on performance and presentation that I felt throughout, that I think you’re speaking to here. And, you know, this assumes this sort of interpretation of the woman’s expression by some external party. You know, a lot of what we’re talking about is like the presence of the male gaze. And I’m thinking a lot in this book of just how much the speaker is moving through that, right? It’s a book that is ostensibly dealing with a lot of art, you know, art pieces, art styles, art techniques. But it’s really kind of the subtext that is tracking this woman’s movement through these things. There’s this double consciousness happening. Speaking more about the art part, though, for people who haven’t read the book yet, the sections of the book are named after different kinds of art making techniques. And so much of the book itself is inspired by various kinds of art. So I’m wondering if you can — this is more of a craft question — can you speak about your relationship to ekphrasis? TB: Yes. That’s my girl. Yeah, I was a fiction writer in undergrad and, you know, I had it in my mind that I was gonna graduate and go on to write the great novel and that’s hilarious and — DC: — you still can, you still can! It is poets’ time for fiction, it really is. TB: I know, I say that as I’ve actually started a novel, so just like, just bear with me. But at the end of undergrad, I actually took an ekphrastic poetry class. The entire semeste
