Encounters for the Living and the Dead (PB) (2025)

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