Blue Pool Cecelia
by Emma Kemp
5 x 7.25 in., clothbound
foil-stamped with tip-in, 60 pp
Second Printing
Design by Elana Schlenker
Image Text Ithaca Press, 2018
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.”