Welcome to the long awaited issue Drunken Boat#19, one that inaugurates a few new features. First, we’d like to welcome Ian Hatcher as our new Arts Editor, and Anna Rosenwong as our Translation Editor, which will become a regular part of the magazine going forward. We encourage you to send us work in those genres and to point us in the direction of anything that you think might appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities.

DB#19 also includes three special folios: one is on Greek translation edited by Vassilis Manoussakis who for many years has helped preside over a meeting of Greek and American poets that met first in Paros, and then in Delphi, working together to create translations from Greek to English and vice-versa. Here, Vassilis has taken the best of some of that work, introducing us to contemporary Greek poets who are pushing forward a notion of our shared transnational poetics and like in Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s poem “Slowly,” we find that all of the shards we share are precious. There’s a long and rich tradition in Greek poetry, dating back many centuries, and we are glad to continue the dialogue; as the ancient poet Aristophanes once wrote, “ a man's homeland is wherever he prospers,” and we feel that these poets are perfectly at home and thriving in our journal.

The second folio, edited by former Drunken Boat Managing Editor, David Harrison Horton, is the China Statement, and it provides a glimpse of the fascinating and fabulist world of contemporary Chinese art, verging from oil paintings like Wu Junyong’s Journey to the Other Side of the Wallto Yao Pang’s reclamation of postage stamps to conceptual Hong Kong artist and architect duo Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix’s multidisciplinary platform that takes serious Jorge Luis Borges’ premise in “On Exactitude in Science” that the map is the space it reveals, in certain unexpected and playful ways.

Finally, if Shakespeare’s suggestion that brevity is the soul of wit still rings true, then flash fiction maestro Tom Hazuka has got it nailed in his Flash Fiction Funny folio, encompassing 37 short works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction meant to make us chuckle, chortle and split a seam. As one of the originators of a genre that has become near ubiquitous, spawning flash fiction, micro fiction and even flash CNF, we are glad to have his contributions in this issue.

There is also a lot on tap for Drunken Boat in the next year—we look forward to having Forrest Gander help us choose and award our first book winner for a work of poetry, translation or hybrid work, and will announce winner before the next AWP conference in Minneapolis, where our winner will read his or her work at Honey, a bumping arts lounge, on Thursday, April 9th. We are also hard at work preparing for our 15th anniversary year, which our next issue, Drunken Boat#20, will help commemorate and we have some juicy tidbits on deck including a poetry comix folio, as well as some incursions into digital and Affrilachian arts and letters. As ever we depend on our readership for support, so thank you for helping us continue to thrive and to expand.

Enjoy and as the Greek say when they make a toast, Stinygiasou! To your health from the wealth of new work in Drunken Boat#19!

Ravi Shankar
Emily Vizzo
& the Editors
Drunken Boat#19