Thresh and Hold | 
pickI 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. 2y