Thresh & Hold

by Marlanda Dekine

Overview

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 and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas. 

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235955
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Marlanda Dekine (she/they) is a poet obsessed with ancestry, memory, and the process of staying within one's own body. Their work manifests as books, audio projects, and workshops, leaving spells and incantations for others to follow for themselves. Dekine's work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, POETRY Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Juke Joint Magazine, OROBORO, Screen Door Review, Root Work Journal, and elsewhere. They are the Founder and former Executive Director of Speaking Down Barriers, Spoken Word Spartanburg, and other organizations that make space for all beings. Currently, they serve as a Healing Justice Fellow with Gender Benders and the 2021-2022 Creative-In-Residence with Castle of our Skins. Dekine is the recipient of many awards, including a Tin House Own Path Scholarship (2021), a SC Humanities Award for Fresh Voices in Humanities (2019), Emrys' Keller Cushing Freeman Fellowship (2019), and grants from the SC Arts Commission, Alternate Roots, The Map Fund, and other organizations. They are a graduate of Furman University (B.A. Psychology), University of South Carolina (M.S.W.), and a third-year MFA Candidate (Poetry) at Converse College.

Table of Contents

The Black River 3

Origin 7

I Am Bound for De Kingdom 8

First Lady of the Church 9

If Anybody Asks You What's the Matter with Me 11

A Rose 12

Hurricane Family 13

My Grandma Told Stories or Cautionary Tales 14

We Opened the Box Tucked Way Back in the Closet 15

My Black, Rural, Queer Childhood 16

Non-Linear 17

Police in Plantersville Elementary School 19

Ma 20

Jackson Village Road 25

Daddy, the Dreamer 27

My Daddy Gave Me Brandy When I Turned Sixteen 28

The Shade Tree 29

Childhood Lessons from the Girl Next Door 30

When the Preacher Was God 31

Collecting Myself 33

Thresh & Hold 34

Perhaps I Am A Fugitive of Empathy 36

A Holy Place 41

When I Build 43

Why We Say "The Village" 44

Preface 46

Plantersville, South Carolina 48

Recordkeeper 50

Shifting Shape 51

Granddaddy's Tools 53

Grain Memory 54

Paris, 2019 56

At a 24-Hour Bar in New Orleans an Anonymous Human Tells Me E Wants to Die 57

Wa E Go Ova Dat Big Ol Wata Fa? 58

Home Body 60

Pine Tree 61

Memories of Emotional Labor 62

The madness that unchains itself 64

If You Really Real, You'd Jump Off This Bridge With Us, For Us 66

Notes 69

Acknowledgements 71

Editorial Reviews

"I cannot and will not put Marlanda Dekine’s, Thresh & Hold down. The world it builds, celebrates, and reclaims is a reckoning and a symphony. From the brutality of the rice plantations of South Carolina to the specific privacy found inside one’s Saturn Vue, the breadth of human experience that unfold in these poems cover histories that, we too often forget, are all intimate stories. Dekine reminds us that every moment we read about is a moment some body has fought or celebrated or been unable to live through. The effect of this is that we are brought into the vast music of a world that is endlessly unfolding, It’s fairly common to read poems that speak about community but there are only a handful of poets alive; Nikky Finney, Destiny Hemphill, CA Conrad come to mind, whose poems truly make community as the work blooms before us. This is a poet of that order and ability. I am so blown away by the gift and the challenge of this book. A book that not for one moment looks away from the brutality and beauty of this world. A book that says, “I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic, contest judge

"This quare ode, this moonbowed conjure, this full-throated hymn-hum to Gullah-Geechee geographies. Lush and fraught, this manuscript brims over with nightingales and okra, inheritance and dispossession, ascent and descent, and flesh that finds rest outside of the body. “Exhausted of singing in an empire’s hopeful choir,” Dekine’s Thresh & Hold offers another song that is full of flight and reverent to  earth’s sacred mysteries. The polyvocal chants of this collection honor the riverine nature of Black homeplace as quietly babbling, muddy with histories, multidirectional, flooding, ever-changing—yet & still, as Morrison reminds us, with a perfect memory." —Destiny Hemphill, author of Oracle: A Cosmology

"We are made of our past, present and future. We are made of the earth that birthed us and the earth we return to when we die. We are made of our ancestors and their voices, which stay alive in us. Marlanda Dekine knows this. They know the land and the blood and the way the body remembers. In these poems, there is a spirit and the rage, love, questioning, medicine, healing, and frenzy of that spirit. There is place and heart, there is accountability and doubt. This book is a prayer and a fist, a history and the hope that comes only from true reckoning, the listening that makes light." —Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!

From the Publisher