Jameela F. Dallis's Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a sensual journey that sweeps the tangible world and the poet's beloveds into its arms—fiercely, tenderly, joyfully. Invoking ancestors and constructing altars to lost loved ones, this collection offers an oceanic engagement with visual art, filtering experience through desire and texture, the artist's canvas, and marine life (especially the bivalve and culinary delight, the oyster). In Dallis's hands, the ekphrastic poem awakes and becomes a living, breathing experience, the attentive act of art gazing on other art splitting open language with a glistening, iridescent shine. In the siren-like, crooning words of the poet:
you: thorny oyster tell me
tell me you want my grit—
from ocean unfathomed deep indigo, silk and saline
tell me I haven't come in vain
tell me I've made you hot, angry, agitated and left you wanting
wanting to be whole once more
Jameela F. Dallis lives in Durham, NC. Her publications include poems, interviews, arts journalism, and literary scholarship in Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, The Fight and the Fiddle, Our State, Walter, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, and elsewhere. She's inspired by memory and desire, the thrill of wandering new cities, and the wonder of everyday encounters. Her work explores texture, taste, sound, sensation, and the richness of visual art. She curated Material Encounters (Peel Gallery, Carrboro, March 2024), juried Scaffold (Artspace, Raleigh, April 2023), and has served on regional curatorial and fellowship committees. Jameela has taught dozens of university courses and facilitated creative workshops for more than a decade. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, Jameela received her B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and holds both an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill. Encounters for the Living and the Dead is her first book of poetry. Read more at jameeladallis.com
"Become mollusk. Notice when these poems crack you open. Notice when you are reading from your so1 places. Your calcified shells. Notice the intimate irritant becoming pearl. Mollusks chemosynthesize the radioactive isotopes of volatile earth in the broken places at the bottom of the ocean. This too is the work of these poems. Become mollusk and notice what changes." — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
"Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a beguiling complexity of creative sensibility. This collection of poetry offers a multiplicity of poetic responses to the questions of time, memory, being, and un-being. Jameela Dallis writes inside the sharp, blunt, but tender internal blade of holy allegiances to wishbones with hopes and allows her pen to decipher and translate the shards of vessels that held prayers. Her inaugural publication is a gaze turned inward with the concerns of conquest, immersion, surrender, and power portrayed with dynamic textures, ekphrasis, and sublime boundaries of craft that capture and demonstrate her sensuous parlous relationship with the sea." — Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
"Jameela F. Dallis is a poet of the senses, lush and unambiguous. Everything—desire and the body's tidal response to its lunar pull, a meal's layers of mineral and green and sea tang, and even grief's 'silked mimosa flowers / abscised and suddenly absent'—appeals to the body and, thus, honors it, and, by honoring it, honors the poet's ancestors, honors 'alltheshes.' This is a book of assertions, of naming the self and, by naming, transforming the self into what she wants to be in any moment—witness, oyster, something craved, stretched canvas, perfumed rice, morning glory—in all the vibrancy of true attention, to become a capital-E Experience beyond the limitsof ordinary (read: colonial, capitalist) imagination into the altarworks of Dallis, an oracle of her own rush and rest, 'Who channels, who listens, who speaks, who dances in these poems unlike anything I have ever read." — Emilia Phillips, author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
"This book, in all its lushness, bravery, and vulnerability reminds me that a feast is not just about abundance, it is also a ceremony, a marking of the sacred. Jameela F. Dallis's Encounters for the Living and the Dead invites me into that ceremony so I might interrogate my own relationship to grief and ongoingness. 'I ate that oyster. / Inhaled decay as it filtered in / my mouth . . .' So few of us are willing to experience life fully if it means being confronted with our deepest hungers and the deep harms we have been forced to live through. So few of us can sit with the living and the dead with the kind of generosity that Dallis does, the deep curiosity, the love. This book stays with me. It fills me with wonder and hope." — Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The New Economy
