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.