Welcome to the 13^th issue of Drunken Boat. This latest installment signals our move towards becoming a quarterly and you should check our blog for updates on new calls for submissions. Featured here are works that traverse the chasm between silence and sound—from the First Peoples Plural folio where indigenous writers and artists from around the world share their experiences, to the Slant/Sex folio which celebrates the sexuality of women and trans-identified people still considered taboo in the era of queer theory, gurlesque and “girls gone wild,” from our special themed nonfiction folio with artists and writers interpreting and integrating playlists in their work to our offerings of the best of contemporary fiction, poetry and art from photography to sound.

Listen to what resounds in the echo of what’s been previously unspoken and hear what connects the once uncontacted as the world shrinks to enlarge around them. Trouble the thread of time that vibrates in many of these pieces, from Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s piece “Out of Time,” where a watch enters a coma during a body search at passport control, to William Lamson’s photographs of an installation where the external windows of a gallery were covered in colorized caramel that over the course of the show began to soften, smear and drip in sugary hues that trapped insects in its translucent amber. Taste the sounds in Natasha Sajé ’s poem “Tinguage:” “the tang of a lyre / of skin, a lick of liberal tact in tandem/ our own langue d’oc, turtled in time.” Revel in the audio tracks and asides that pepper Jediah Purdy’s “A Tolerable Anarchy: The Mixtape,” which asserts a mixtape is a shadow of a book. Touch the primordially flowing river written in and then translated from the Chinese by Mai Mang to discover the Herodotus’ truth that the water’s never the same even in the same place. Find new translations of Tomaž Šalamun’s poetry in Slovenian and in English.

Sound and time are just two of the themes embodied by this 13th installment of Drunken Boat and there’s much more, from Patrick Rosal’s extraordinary lyric essay on pianos and his childhood, to sound art by the inimitable Michael K. Myers. We’re glad to share this work with you and hope you’ll find as much to revel in as we do. Write to us and tell us what you think, and look out for our live events, including a launch party for this issue. Thanks for helping us do our part to keep it buoyant. Happy 2011.

Editors, Drunken Boat