Blue Selvage: An Evening with Preeti Parikh with Yalie Saweda Kamara

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

The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives—where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.

Preeti Parikh’s debut poetry collection is a mapping of boundaries, a (re)framing of fractured interiority, a text(ile) unfurling across shifting homelands. In this deeply embodied, formally daring meditation, the corpus is both archive and threshold, a site where “what’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form.” Here, passion for indigo, a medical-science informed perspective, fascination with the materiality of cloth and skin, and a journeying towards reclamation interlace with feminist inquiries and cultural examination to conceptualize the poems’ multivalent inhabitances.

Expansive in its rhetorical modes and landscapes, Blue Selvage is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision through which Parikh skillfully invokes form as metaphor, performance, dramatization, and content. Throughout the book, recurrent vocabularies and silences—integument, selvage, gaze—operate as warp and weft, binding personal experience to collective striving, devotion, and survival. Meanwhile, on the page, multilingual textures and typographic openness resist closure, offering apertures for looking within and without. What emerges is a capacious field of attention, where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Blue Selvage will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

About Preeti Parikh

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 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and a 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award.

Preeti’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and other literary journals. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2021 and 2022 editions), and The Last Milkweed. Preeti has been a Millay Arts Artist-in-Residence and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has been performed in a poetry-ballet collaboration and exhibited at the 2025 Creative Asian Society Art Exhibition. Born and raised in India, she now lives with her family in Ohio.

Preeti Parikh’s collection of poems, BLUE SELVAGE, named by Debutiful as a Most Anticipated Debut Book and one of The Debut Poetry Collections You Need to Read in 2026, will be out in November from Tupelo Press.