"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!