Blue Selvage, the debut poetry collection by Preeti Parikh, weaves lyric, essayistic, and documentary modes into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and the body as living archives marked by gendered, racialized, and colonial histories. Moving across shifting homelands, languages, and forms, the collection examines memory, inheritance, and reclamation, asking how the body carries what culture attempts to erase and how language can become a means of re-stitching fractured identities.
Blue Selvage will be published on November 1, 2026, by Tupelo Press and is available for preorder now.
Preeti Parikh is an Indian-born poet and essayist whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Cincinnati Review, The Margins, and Nonwhite and Woman. A Kundiman Fellow, National Poetry Series finalist, and recipient of awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, she holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Ohio with her family, and Blue Selvage is her debut poetry collection.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Blue Selvage, designed by Ann Aspell with art from Joanne Dugan, along with a Q&A with Parikh about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
While I had not preemptively thought of a cover image as I wrote the book, visual elements populated my imagination as I followed threads of conceptual curiosity and creative exploration in my work towards Blue Selvage. Among the critical breakthroughs, a significant occurrence was that I fell in love with indigo and developed a deep fascination for the color blue. The indigo dye, in particular, allured me with its earthy aesthetics, its magical transformations, and its universality and complicated history. I found myself evoking these colors in my work both textually and visually. Meanwhile, I also unearthed a fiery obsession with textiles, which then became one of the overarching metaphors for my book. As all of this progressed, I was also paying attention to the work of many contemporary visual artists and textile artisans, and these creations of art and textile processes became part of my admiration and appreciation pool/image bank. However, it was only after my manuscript was accepted for publication that I began to parse out the elements I might have wished for in my book cover.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Quite early in the publishing process, I was asked, as part of the author questionnaire, to provide input on my cover art inspiration. As I perused examples of covers that especially drew me in, I realized that I gravitate towards strong lines, abstraction, vivid colors, and striking compositions. I conveyed these early impressions to the design team along with examples from the public-domain image pool. I also went back to the image bank of contemporary artwork I had maintained over the years and quickly recognized a strong affinity to Joanne Dugan’s work. Joanne is a photographer, visual artist, and author whose artistry I truly admire and from whom I’ve also had the pleasure of learning in past Image-Text workshops. With the publishing team on board with the idea of possibly showcasing her art on the cover, I approached Joanne, and she very graciously agreed to allow the usage of her photogram collage, which I was particularly enamored with. Soon after, Tupelo Press designer Ann Aspell worked on the cover composition, and after considering a few variations in layout and color-font options, we were all able to concur on the design as it exists now, so beautifully.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
While I had a degree of preexisting familiarity with the cover image, finalizing the cover was a gloriously satisfying feeling. As a debut author going through the book publication process for the first time, I found this step vital to my perception of the manuscript becoming a published work of literature, a cohesive, concrete object to be held and considered. I felt immensely grateful for the book description and blurbs on the back cover that graciously introduce Blue Selvage and frame it perceptively for readers, as well as for the front cover design and artwork that inhabit a strikingly beautiful presence, a visual that compels the viewer’s attention while also embodying multiple layers of resonance with the throughlines of the book.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover image, Dune Shack Cyanotype, #1, is a grid collage of photograms by Joanne Dugan, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. An interdisciplinary artist, she describes the cyanotype as a “centuries-old photographic process that connects [her] to painting” and recalls making the artwork during an artist residency in a vintage dune shack in the remote sand dunes of Provincetown, MA. She elaborates that there was no electricity or running water in the shack (in fact, water came from a freshwater well fifty yards down a steep hill) and that the piece manages to “visually summarize what it felt like to be there and is highly informed by [her] daily mindfulness meditation practices.” The artist describes the element of “visual disruption” in the repetitive composition as symbolizing the “flash of insight that occurs through meditation.”
Dune Shack Cyanotype, #1’s assemblage awash with blue appeals to me greatly for its play with geometry, line, color, and (a)symmetry. It is also a grid, an array of iterations, an accrual process that resonates with the movement patterns of my book, which in turn weaves lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into a sustained meditation. Akin to Blue Selvage’s incantations on skin, cloth, color, and form, the artwork’s rhythms of repetition offer a solace that, in its many variations, also vacillates between order and aberration, rupture and containment. These prismatic impulses, too, seem to interface meaningfully with the multivalence of Blue Selvage, which, with its shifting homelands, ruptured forms, multilingual textures and typographic openness, and recurrent vocabularies and silences, is gashed with the wounds of what’s urgent and frayed with what’s unsayable.