Blue Pool Cecelia

In June 2017, ITI Press sent writer Emma Kemp and Joanne Walters–who had never met–on assignment to Walters’ hometown, a place “with a history of extraction, a town defined by its water… a leaky town in which the cycle of swelling and breaching initiates structural deformations.” Mining newspaper records and bar-stool conversations, Kemp’s writing careens along a damaged trajectory of women’s lives lived along the margins of the Mississippi. Equal parts travelogue, true crime drama and artist’s portrait, Kemp’s riveting and genre-bending text reveals how, in Walters’ photographs, “time shoves itself backwards and forwards, a crooked tideline extending through each girl and woman.”