Become mollusk. Notice when these poems crack you open. Notice when you are reading from your soft 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 limits of 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 flittered 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