Praise for Blue Selvage:

Much like the selvage of a woven cloth, which is fabricated to prevent an unraveling, so, too, are the constructs against which Parikh writes in her debut collection. Immediately striking are the forms the pieces take on the page, carved into the white space both typographically and thematically. The reader understands the deliberate choices made to weave form and content into a tapestry of history, place, identity, science, skin. Through a young life on one continent and an adult life on another, Parikh offers a perspective that is both arresting and generous. It is an assemblage of landscapes both internal and external, fragments and poetic layering. The poet writes, “I know that I am lost. The ripples I see when I look in the mirror have lost grip of the incepting focus. Who have I become–expanded, uncontained?” Parikh guides the reader as the work focuses and refocuses but never with a heavy hand. The experience resembles that of viewing a complex tapestry over time, as one delights in finding a new detail or some deeper dimension to mine.
—Booklist

The artistry of Preeti Parikh’s debut collection, Blue Selvage, is one of daring precision—an embroidery of vivid, textured language that explores the instability of boundaries and the implications of integument: cover and exposure, clothing and skin, diaspora and the “dreamcloth” of identity. This is the poetics we need today, one that deeply enacts the decentralization of power by meditating on edges both frayed and selvaged and traversing the thresholds of body, language, culture, and memory. Parikh’s multi-lingual, multi-modal tapestry is beautiful, articulate, and brave. A refreshing and liberating voice!
—Jennifer Elise Foerster, Author of The Maybe Bird

Poetry as the work of embodiment, of transformation—this principle manifests as a gorgeous new expression in Blue Selvage. But as Preeti Parikh shows, the arc towards self-realization is also about the tensions between raveling and unraveling, stitching and unstitching, text and lacuna. Delving into the intimacy of memory and the violence of history, Parikh understands that “opacity and translucence” are both necessary to deep testimony. Bold in its forms and defiant in its truths, Blue Selvage is a radiant debut.
—Rick Barot, Author of Moving the Bones

Blue Selvage is an inventive palimpsest of South Asian history and autobiography, unspooling the female body and the weight of its inheritance. Braiding memory with etymology, and medical terminology with the cadences of Hindi and Gujarati, Parikh navigates multiple geographies—clinical, domestic, diasporic. Here, fabric both covers and bares. The body is archive and anatomy, born a 'milky clump' of cotton and marked by indigo's colonial violence. This is fierce work on the gaze and its exposures, a reckoning with touch, shame, and desire that stains the reader's mind blue and selvages the self. A stunning debut by a luminous new voice.
—Shikha Malaviya, Author of Anandibai Joshee, A Life in Poems

Blue Selvage is a chronicle of dichotomies, both difficult and joyful. Preeti Parikh’s debut collection of poems is exhilarating. Here we find a convincingly modern mind — one formed in girlhood on one continent and evolving into an empowered woman and poet on another. The tensions of family and culture explored in this book are numerous: what’s lost and what’s found; what’s private and what’s a violation; what’s a mask and what’s a face; what is broken and what is healed. The concentrated, formally varied poems weave shame and empowerment, the buried and the unearthed, the forgotten and the remembered. When Parikh writes, “let the fabric breathe,” she is conveying complexities of feeling, fluency, and morality that any reader will recognize as clarity and grace.
—David Biespiel, Author of Beautiful Is the World

I’m currently accepting invitations for poetry readings, craft talks, workshops, classroom visits, panels, and more. I’d love to hear from you—send me a note!