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.