Our featured publication for July and August is The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford, published by The Emma Press.

While newly married, with the couple expecting their first child, Catherine Redford’s wife was tragically diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Way the Water Held Me is a mesmeric plunge into the caring, grief, loss and love experienced by a young widow. Across poems of heartbreak and honesty, memory and mourning – and through unlikely companionship with a widowed Mary Shelley – Catherine Redford’s debut collection is visceral, profound and alive with what it is to be human, to have lost and to find ways to continue to love.

‘A beautiful, heartbreaking book that charts deepest grief and deepest love. Catherine Redford is a luminous writer and her poems will touch your heart.’ Liz Berry

‘Part elegy, part seance, part scream, this is a gorgeous wound and wonder of a book. Spiked with dark humour and the gothic shades of Mary Shelley, luminous with metaphor and experiment, The Way the Water Held Me bears witness to dark tides of grief and the irretrievable grammar of shared love. It is essential, transformative reading.’ Fiona Benson

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Circles

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Performance

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Mary Shelley and I hold a séance

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Not Our Bed

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Catherine Redford started writing poetry after being widowed at the age of 35. Her writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Magma (as Selected Poet), Under the Radar, New Welsh Reader, Propel, Lighthouse, and Atrium. She is an editor at Dust Poetry, a Writing West Midlands Room 204 writer, and a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Poet. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection.

The Way the Water Held Me is available to purchase from The Emma Press website, here.