The Tusculum Review: Volume 2

The hollowware cake sculpture by artist Alison Pack on the cover of Volume 2—made of copper, silver, and other inedible things—advertises this as an issue for foodies, frustrated ones. The smorgasbord of writing here offers many scenes of tantalizing food and delicious nature, but the birds in these poems, stories, and essays are always flying away. Penelope Scambly Schott’s poem features a single magpie left behind by her flock. Poet Laverne Frith’s “The Dark Birds” describes “ . . . birds born to walk on water.”Flora and fauna are observed with reverence. Jake Adam York’s “Already” is a 25-line poem that feels like extreme time-lapse photography churning through several centuries of a pioneered landscape. It’s a savored bite: at the end, you still remember the beginning.In Jay Snodgrass’s poems, “insects ask me new tough ones” and “My bird’s heart falls out / Into your hands.” 2019 National Book Award for Poetry winner Carmen Giménez Smith’s “Geographic Cure” begins “prostrate on your wool blanket” and her “Idea in a Ruinous State” opens with park pigeons and eventually listens to primates on another continent: “ . . . in the kingdom of midnight, / macaques hum a fugue from overgrown orange trees.” David Essex’s 12-line, two-breath poem, “Cognito,” notes the “way that their capacity for flight / requires that flies, bees, bats, and birds be relatively light.”There’s an ode to Larry Levis—“The End of Larry”—co-authored by Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Maureen Seaton, and Kristine Snodgrass featuring a crystal-set dining room with gourds and candles inspired by Martha Stewart and an image of a Seussian line drawing. In her essay, “The Edible Woman,” Karen Tolchin has her palm read by Margaret Atwood at the Biltmore Hotel for a reading and author interrogation: “Did she write in the morning or at night, at a kitchen table or in a private office? Could she use a dog walker or valet in Ontario?”In Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow’s “Autopsy: Upon the Tamis Table,” “Kidney socks balled in / on themselves from spatial concerns, cushioned / in fat like pastries.” You’ve not read work like this before.Two artists are featured in the glossy centerpiece: Tracey Cockrell and Jim Cicatko. Printed here are sketches of Cockrell’s plans for her sound sculptures and photographs of the sculptures themselves that make you wish you’d been in the gallery to touch the keys. Cicatko’s oil on paper portraits of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the biblical Elijah, and an anonymous white figure have a grey-blue glow, inviting textures, candid facial expressions, and outstretched hands.Poetry Prize winner DeAnna Stephens Vaughn’s quartet of poems, “Glossary of Terms My Family Never Used,” is agricultural, domestic, and menacing. In “Threnody,” “ . . . catnip loses / leaves to the daughter who sleepwalks. / In summer, sassafras thins her / blood in the beanfield and orchard. / Grandmother won’t let her inside; / The season and phase of the moon / would reject each fruit her hands washed, / would ferment every jar she filled.” “Voyeur” and “Chrysalis” move indoors, where there are “weapon-heavy / jars of Pond’s cold cream” on a mother’s vanity.In the Fiction Prize-winning story here, “Elm,” by Joan Corwin, amateur tree surgeon Nelson Holmes drives his Skylark to remove trees marked dead inside, Dutch elm diseased. The people of his new town reveal themselves to him over several months. He’s quietly fascinated by an ill young woman with a dead tree in her yard. “And as the summer declined into luscious senility,” Nelson reveals his own heartbreak to the reader. He observes the people and the trees: “There was just enough light left in the sky to turn the tree limbs black. They formed a tracery that reminded him of veins. In the dark like this, it was impossible to tell that the elm was dead; it still retained that passionate grace.” The collaborative, writing community-celebrating complexion of this volume continues with “Two Friends Review Each Other,” a feature in which Lisa Williams reviews Chella Courington’s chapbook, Southern Girl Gone Wrong and Courington considers Williams’s Letters to Virginia Woolf, “memoir, fiction, and poetry thread[ed] together.” The volume concludes with microreviews of collections: stories, essays, poetry, and postmodern texts/transcripts. As the credits roll, the volume’s contributors each recommend four or five works by other writers, a gluttonous list that reminds us both of the bestselling authors of the aughts--Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Richard Russo, Alexander McCall Smith, Cormac McCarthy, Mary Gaitskill--and the books we still haven’t gotten to. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking came out in 2005, and Penelope Scambly Schott recommends it here, a few months later. Others return to the Brothers Grimm, Maxim Gorky, Pablo Neruda, Adrienne Rich.The editors of Volume 2, Mary Boyes and Richard Greenfield, have gone on to found Metap...