Five Questions with Author Jameela F. Dallis

We’re excited to present our Five Questions author interview with Jameela F. Dallis, where we encourage our gentle readers to preorder your copy of Encounters for the Living and the Dead!

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How does the idea of place, something we love at River River Books, shape your collection?

I’ve written parts of this collection in many places: chiefly Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina, and Paris and Samois-sur-Seine, France. But poems hold moments from Marrakech, Morocco, Brooklyn, New York, and my hometown, Chattanooga, Tennessee. There’s Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I lived for a time, and New Orleans, Louisiana, where I long to return. When I’m writing, I want to invoke the fullness of a place—its texture, its scent, its taste, and its visual cacophony. I invoke place through the memories of what I ate, drank, and the people I know, knew, or met by chance. I take a lot of notes.

The ocean moves throughout the collection. It’s simultaneously a place, no place, and every place. I have been drawn to the ocean for a long time. I only went a handful of times as a young person, and I have seashells from those visits to beaches I can’t name. More recently, the ocean has become a place of retreat and restoration. I long to step in, let the waves crash into my body, and sit and listen. I crave salt, the sand plastered to my toes, and the scent of gulls and decaying things. It may be corny, but returning to the ocean—the primordial soup—is something baked into my being.

In the last decade, I’ve eaten more seafood than ever before in my life. Hence, I’ve developed more respect for and acknowledgement of the perils of fishing and overfishing to humans, marine life, and our environment. Two of the earlier oyster poems, “There’s a place without oysters” and “There came to be a place with no oysters” speak to these perils. In the former poem, the speaker asks, “excess. foreshadowing what? / an end? the end? / butchers will butcher / body land no escape.” With unchecked consumption and endless development, what are we left with? A dead place where not even oysters will filter and flitter.

What is a poem that you see as a particular driving force in your collection, and why?

“Les bêtes de la mer.” I wrote it during my solo writing residency at Le Trait d’Union in Samois-sur-Seine, France. The poem embodies so much of the collection’s spirit: it’s ekphrastic, there are oysters, and the speaker both imagines her human self as an animal self and collapses the space between human and animal. In English, the title is “The beasts of the sea.”

In terms of its ekphrastic nature, it’s in response to Henri Matisse’s 1950 cut-out work of the same name (see above image). The residency had an impressive art library for its size, and with an intuitive approach, I settled on an exhibition catalog of a MOMA Matisse retrospective. Then, with the spirit of bibliomancy, I opened to a page with the artwork Les bêtes de la mer. I remembered then that I’d completed a master copy of it in high school and thought, “Wow, now I have to write a poem.” So, I did something I call “keyword ekphrasis,” and wrote the poem in essentially one sitting.

The speaker says, “I have become one of les bêtes de / la mer. Not a great white or a majestic orca. / Yet I am magic. Tender, fluid. / I am oyster.” Oysters frequent the collection. I consider them small yet critical beasts of the sea. This poem and several others deal with what it means to be seen and not seen and assert that small things matter. Oysters can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. If they can do that, at the very least, I can use them as an artistic device to filter emotion, experience, and work out ways to beauty.

What was a significant revision that occurred along the way?

“Black, holy time” began as a very different poem. I wrote it in 2021 and revised it in spring 2024. Then, the Commons Crit asked me to write a piece in response to Carolina Performing Arts’s 2024 Commons Festival. So, I returned to the poem and its central question that is also an idea: “What is holy?” asked the speaker. The original poem answers with the idea of a star’s death, the black hole it eventually creates, and how these strange cosmic things rupture our ideas about time and space. I wove in a connection to a mythic African queen, but it didn’t work.

When revisiting the poem in the context of the Commons Festival, the idea of the star’s death and its connection to time and history became clearer. I want to play with language intentionally—in a way that works both aurally and on the page. I want people to consider how black hole/black whole/black wholly/black holy are connected, and how time and history can be troublesome, tricky, engulfing, and imprecise. I thought, what if I took elements I loved from the original and included them in a larger ekphrastic-in-spirit poem?

The poem in its present form answers “What is holy” with: remembering is holy, witnessing is holy, and victims and survivors of unspeakable histories are holy. And it expands the idea of return when there is no precise place to return—when history has, as it were, sucked places, people, and memories into its black hole.

The first line, “A portal is a conduit to transformation and a star’s death is varnished with black, holy time” remains the same. After I rewrote the poem, I knew it was the portal or opening poem. It’s a poem that calls on my forebears—benevolent and otherwise—to witness as I witness them.

At what stage did your final title emerge—early, late? How did it help with your collection’s conception?

The title came at the last minute. The collection was originally Les Bêtes de la Mer—from the poem inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1950 work of the same name—but I feared publishers might think the collection was in French instead of English, so I decided on that title for the second part. Yet, I knew I wanted the title to represent a part of a poem or series of poems.

The title is from the final stanza of the first “Material encounters” poem: “And these encounters with the materials of creation: velvet black, green sprout, ruby, feldspar pink, and phytoplankton blue are for the living and the dead.”

The “Material encounters” poem cycle grew from an ekphrastic poem I wrote for the exhibition I curated at Peel in Carrboro, NC, in 2024. I’d taken notes on pieces and wrote most of the poem’s first section in a Wilmington, NC, coffee shop with the keyword ekphrasis method I mentioned above. Its form surprised me as “IN THE BEGINNING” invokes a creation narrative. Then, more scenes and phrases announced themselves, and I kept writing poems until I had four.

Together, the collection’s three sections Altarworks, Les Bêtes de la Mer, and Ekphrastic Encounters pay homage to the dead and create and celebrate spaces for living full, bright, passionate, complicated lives.

What’s something you wish every reader could know about you as the writer of your book?

I love to laugh. I seek out beauty. I love loving people. I love language and playing with words and meaning. People can talk to me about difficult things. I love getting lost in research. It’s hard for me to wish for only one thing.

Preorder Encounters for the Living and the Dead today! Shipping in September.

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.