Jameela F. Dallis: Encounters for the Living and the Dead | River River Books; September 2025
When Jameela F. Dallis sat down to turn her poetry habit into a collection, the connections she found in her own work surprised her. There were cherished tributes to late friends that she’d held on to for years, work from writing workshops she’d led at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and lots and lots of oysters.
“I started thinking, ‘Why am I writing about oysters?’” Dallis told me on a recent call. “And it’s not just that I like to eat them” (though she enthusiastically does). Dallis, who holds a PhD in literature, recounts having had a moment of panic after eating a bad oyster that helped her break into artistic expression about a traumatic experience. She was already half a dozen poems into this mollusk-imagery theme. But the urgency of this metaphor, “how the oysters are a metaphor for something very beautiful that can also harbor something very bad,” helped her settle into this emerging theme.
Dallis pulls on more than a decade and a half of poems for the collection, which is split into three parts: “Altarworks,” “Les bêtes de la mer” after an artwork by Matisse, and “Ekphrastic Encounters.” And Dallis’s inspirations are just as wide-ranging. She’s written poems for family, friends, and loved ones who have passed away; poems that respond to or engage with dozens of works of visual art and/or writing; and poems that trundle across the ocean floor. Sometimes, all of these things happen in the same poem.
Dallis has been an engaged member of the Durham arts and tarot scenes (among others) for decades, and this collection fulfills a promise to herself: to sell or publish a book by the end of her 40th year. Dallis placed her collection with River River Books, a new local poetry publisher, well before her deadline. INDY Week spoke to Dallis about the genesis of this collection, the way she chose her imagery, and the process of responding to changing tides in art, ecology, and society. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: This is a wide-ranging collection. How did this specific set of poems emerge?
Jameela F. Dallis: I wanted the collection to acknowledge where I’ve come from and where I am, and potentially where I’ll be going. Where I came from is represented in that first part, “Altarworks.” There are poems to folks who have passed on. The earliest poem, “Blue,” is in there, and “Blue” is for my friend Cora. She died by suicide, and she was really young. She was a writer, and she had a really big impact on me; that we could share this love of writing. She was a chef, and she helped me develop a palate and a way to talk about wine. There’s a lot of wine in the book.
It’s kind of funny, I wasn’t expecting I was gonna answer this question in that way. When she died, she left a lot of work behind. It’s work that, at some point, maybe one day, her family wants to publish, I’m not sure. But I told her, after she had passed, that I’m going to take some writing classes to try to write through, work through, this experience. I’ve revised it since I originally wrote it, but, yeah, I always said, when I get my first book, I’m not gonna forget her.
I think I didn’t expect the three sections in this collection to be as permeable as they are. I assumed poems dedicated to people, sea creatures, and ekphrastic works would each have their own section. But instead, you play with all three of these modalities in all three sections. Can you talk more about how they were divided?
The end of section one, the poem “See Me Now,” is probably one of the newest poems. I definitely wrote that after the book had been accepted. I went to Morocco in 2023, and there’s this moment where I’m on the roof of this hotel, Jnane Tamsna. And I was crying there because I was so overcome with this emotion of being in this space. And I was just thinking, “Oh my God. If my ancestors, who were forced from their homes and villages in West Africa, could see me now.” I knew that I had to write a poem about that. And then I was thinking about other places I had been and felt that way.
One was Gadsden’s Wharf in South Carolina, where so many ships carrying enslaved people docked. I remember feeling overcome with emotion when I stood there. These were moments that were definitely separated by time but brought me together. I was thinking, “How can I connect these through water, through the ocean?” And I was like, oysters.
I’ve eaten oysters in so many different places. Every time I eat an oyster, I ask where it’s from and think about the course that it took to get to my platter. It made sense as a transition poem to move from thinking about folks who have passed on, then transitioning into the ocean through the image of me eating all these oysters.
It’s not that every poem has an oyster in it. Every poem has to do with some sort of beast of the sea, be it a little shrimp or a big old monster spider crab. And then that last part, I think that they’re more like—I don’t want to say portraits, but those last poems are almost like vignettes. I don’t think that they hang together as closely as some of the other poems, but I think of them as snapshots, especially the poem for my dad, “I Do Not Swim nor Do I Have Manicured Grass.”
That poem is an ekphrastic response to an actual photograph. I wanted that last section to feel like encounters with art. So it’s “Ekphrastic Encounters.” It’s kind of literal, but I wanted people to leave the ocean, where everything flows together, and have these moments of walking through a museum.
These are very sensory poems. You touch on most senses, but you are so interested in color, especially blue, which feels even more poignant after understanding the background of that poem, and obviously ties into the ocean. Why do you think you’re so interested in color as a way to relate to things?
I think because I am a visual learner—it comes down to that. And also, I always like to say that art is my first love, and color makes me happy. I know that this is sort of centered in seeing, and that’s part of the reason why there are other senses that I try to bring in as well. Because I know that everyone who encounters my work might not be seeing. But I feel like, in terms of how we encounter art—a lot of times the first thing people will talk about is the colors. It’s often the first way that we describe things. Thinking about kids too, when they’re learning their colors. Like a banana is yellow, and an orange is orange, that sort of thing. It breaks things down into simple parts.
I also wanted to challenge myself to get very specific with the kind of blue. Is it ultramarine? Is it cornflower? There are these nuances and differences, and those bring back their own memories with them.”
I also wanted to challenge myself to get very specific with the kind of blue. Is it ultramarine? Is it cornflower? There are these nuances and differences, and those bring back their own memories with them. I wanted people to be able to encounter different sorts of blues and be in the poem, but also to comb their own consciousness and their own memories of a kind of blue that they’ve encountered.
This connection to my friend Cora and the idea of blue is also, you know—when people are depressed, they say they’ve got the blues. That was something I was playing with there. And obviously, it has grown into a different space in the manuscript overall. I was very much thinking about blue and how it occupies so many spaces in that poem. But you know, my friend’s no longer here because she was blue.
I read that you were thinking at one point about how much oysters filter their environment. I’m wondering if you think of ekphrasis as an analogous process? Where you’re taking so much in and filtering and perhaps creating out of that?
I don’t know if I have explicitly in that way, but it makes sense to me. That’s interesting because I think the way that I approach ekphrasis is not in a literal way. It’s not like “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But yeah, I think it is a form of filtering. You know, it’s filtering your response through your own memory, life experience, your own way of talking about and encountering art. All of that, you bring with you when you know you’re having a moment of “I want to respond to this piece.”
The whole literal thing about oysters and how much they can filter per day—it’s phenomenal. It feeds into this larger thing that I’ve been thinking about with our climate and our oceans and responsibilities that we have. When oysters get sick, we get sick. If there’s some place that is so polluted that oysters can’t live, and their whole job is to filter out these pollutants, what does that say about our environment, about our relationship to our environment?
You hear so much about different places where the water is so polluted that you can’t eat the fish you get from there. “There’s a Place without Oysters” and the one that comes after it, “There Came to Be a Place with No Oysters,” are two of the poems that surprised me the most as I was writing them and working through them, and the larger message around our responsibility.
Were you thinking in terms of ecopoetics writing this collection, or was this another one of those predilections that emerged as you were creating?
Yeah, I think the second one a little bit more so, “And There Came to Be a Place.” The last one in that series [“I Will Not Look Away”] is for my love, Will, who passed in 2020. That last poem is [also] for St. James. Did you ever go to St. James, the restaurant?
Yes, yes, I did. Loved it.
OK, this is going to be kind of a wormhole. So I’ll start here. The first poem [“There’s a Place without Oysters”] is in response to this meat stall painting by Pieter Aertsen. You think it’s just a picture of a meat stall, and then you look in the back and it’s the Holy Family escaping to Egypt. But at the same time, there are little notes in the painting that are about development in the area. These developers were coming in and, I think, trying to buy up the church’s property, and there was a big controversy about it. On the NCMA site, it goes into detail about all the things that are going on in this painting, and I was like, whoa.
That third [poem] is thinking about St. James and how it becomes just another victim of development. And now, of course, it’s just sitting there empty. That is the last place that Will and I had a date, and it was one of the last times I saw him in the flesh, alive. Every time I pass by there, it’s like a memorial to the last place that we went out.
For the second one [in the series, “And There Came to Be a Place without Oysters”], I was thinking more about those old images of oyster middens, and I was thinking about history and what is beneath the middens, and the roles that middens played, especially to Indigenous populations. So that poem is a little bit more conscious of the ecopoetics.
Dallis will be reading from the collection at her book launch party on September 21, at Delafia Wine Bar.
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