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Descant – 2003

Volume 42

2003

Weston Cutter

It’s one of those great, relatively rare feelings: finding a journal with not a single author (or very very few) you recognize, a journal you may have heard of but have never actually read through, and within a few pages you’re hooked. It’s one of those great, relatively rare feelings: finding a journal with not a single author (or very very few) you recognize, a journal you may have heard of but have never actually read through, and within a few pages you’re hooked. This was my lucky experience with Descant, a magazine I feel like I’ve read in countless contributor biographies. From the first lines in Bruce Machart’s “Where You Begin” to the last ones by Ronna Wineberg in her “Encyclopedia” (the interview with Michael Mewshaw is fine and readable as hell, but it’s nothing, candle-power-wise, to intended fiction or poetry), I was taken in by voices in stories (sole complaint: too much first person) and poems, like all the best, I couldn’t see coming with that oomph that makes it poetry. It’s a slim, fine volume, an annual that, once you know it, is something to look forward to like the longest day of summer and cool nights thereafter. [Descant, Department of English, Texas Christian University, TCU Box 297270, Fort Worth, TX 76129. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $10. http://www.eng.tcu.edu/journals/descant/] – WC

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