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.