I released my first full-length collection of short fiction and poetry May 2010. Published by Two-Handed Engine Press (ISBN 13: 978-0-9820020-0-1 ISBN 10: 0-9820020-0-9) Bartab: An Afterhours Ballad is a novel in verse and is the narrative account of a musician couple living in urban Virginia. It’s available here, as well as at booksellers anywhere and online at Amazon.
Press for Bartab: An Afterhours Ballad
“Cesca Janece Waterfield…understands that laughter and heartbreak are frequently two sides of the same coin.”
Marc Schuster, author of The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl, PS Books
“Drawing deeply from a lifetime of musicianship, Bartab establishes early on a sort of subconscious soundtrack laced with blues-soaked Americana. …heartily recommended to anyone seeking strong work by new voices in contemporary American poetry.” -Lady Janes’s Miscellany, San Francisco Bay Press, July 2010
“…the format allows Waterfield to create a pitch-perfect reproduction of the fragmentary nature of memory–the book’s form is perfectly suited to its content. Gritty, desperate, passionate, and heartfelt…” – August 9, 2009
“Cesca Janece Waterfield writes the blues in Bartab: An Afterhours Ballad. Reading her book is like listening to a great radio station in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep – you know someone is singing for you and you are singing with her. …pays witness to good love and bad love and what we mistake for love.” – Denise Duhamel, author of Kinky (Orchises Press) and Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Bartab is the unblinking look at the sometimes severe terms of artistic ambition crossed with poverty and substance abuse. Ultimately, the book is a ransom to the métier of sobriety.
Both the work as a whole, and the discrete poems and stories that comprise its 121 pages are spare and authentic renderings of life lived on the fringes. Local references to music venues and neighborhoods make Bartab particularly interesting to residents of and visitors to Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, and New York City.
In rooms and on highways where only the reckless and distracted fly, Bartab moves from the charm of romance and allure of ambition, through the disappointment and fury in their defeat. It even briefly lights the author’s intimate perspective in a true-life murder tragedy gnashed in a blitz of media coverage for more than a year.
Bartab resonates with any reader who has stumbled in pursuit of a dream and from their own blunders.