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Thresh and Hold
Thresh and Hold | Marlanda Dekine
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Marlanda Dekine's debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation's founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine's poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines intergenerational traumas and calls institutions from the Works Progress Administration narratives to modern-day museums to task. Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: "I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today." Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.
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Thresh and Hold | Marlanda Dekine
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I bought this because it won the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

The poems are about the poet's multi-generational background and rural childhood, full of Gullah-Geechee culture as a living vibrant element the poet also participates in while also queering that experience, all serving to look at these details with fresh eyes. The poems about parents and grandparents are particularly memorable, as is "Hurricane Family."

ReadingEnvy So then I'm reading the acknowledgments like I always do and the poet thanks several people I know - a music major who is now an opera singer in France, a former academic dean, and a former chaplain. I did a little research to discover they were a student at the university where I work, with just a few years overlap. Perhaps we met. 3y
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