Overview

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

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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

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