Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse. 

As Preeti Parikh considers necessary questions of immigration, identity, and belonging, she skillfully invokes form as metaphor, as performance, as dramatization, as content. “What’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form,” she reminds us. While Parikh’s debut Blue Selvage encompasses such diverse rhetorical modes as the lyric, erasure, prose poetry, and templates that are not germane to poetry, her work is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision. These poems share a commitment to not only articulating the relationship between language and alterity, but also to forever refining the question. “Perhaps, a cloth shrouding bone and soft tissue reveals how it is the skin that is / perceived as boundary—boundary of the self, of us, and of the other,” Parikh writes. 

Preeti Parikh is a poet and essayist with a past educational background in medicine and a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. Parikh’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and The Last Milkweed, the last of which was also published by Tupelo. Parikh has been a Millay Arts resident and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in India, she lives with her family in Ohio.