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…