Cesca Janece Waterfield

Conspiracy Cherry gambols with wit and cavorts with high and low culture as it whips up a cast of richly-voiced women including a Parisian dancer who flees the city with a wedge of swans, and the Biblical woman known from antiquity merely as "Lot's wife." This chimeric collection sings of a world that provides for its blossoms as well as its blight. That world, both visible and covert, is ours.

A portrait miniature of the estuaries and rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, The Oyster Garden evokes pine and pecan trees, the freshwater of the Blue Ridge Hills, summons the Rappahannock River and its banks. It conjures lightning-season burns that promote growth of fire-adapted native plants in the Wiregrass region of Alabama. The collection is timely. Greenhouse gases driving climate change threaten both ecosystems. Not long ago, oysters of the Chesapeake Bay region were nearly decimated by increased algae resulting from warming oceans. Though recovery efforts recently brought a resurgence of crassostrea virginica oysters, this progress has been imperiled. The Oyster Garden is also the figuration of southern identity as it shapes a family who ultimately finds the land is inseparable from their own course, flight, and return.