As the Esopus Foundation Ltd. enters its 10th year of operation, we’ve been making some major changes. Last summer, we closed Esopus Space, our performance and exhibition venue in Greenwich Village, so that we could focus more fully on producing the magazine. In September, we relocated our offices to Brooklyn. Because that trip across the river happened to coincide with what would have been the production period for Esopus 19, we asked the contemporary artist Robert Gober to create a limited edition to act as a placeholder for the issue. The result, the remarkable Hope Hill Road, was sent as a gift to all of our (exceedingly patient) subscribers in October. After spending the rest of the fall and winter rebuilding our website from scratch, we launched the redesigned esopusmag.com, sporting a host of new features and functions, this January.

And finally, for this issue—as you’ve probably already noticed—we decided to turn Esopus on its side. This reorientation seemed like an effective way to present new challenges both to ourselves and to our contributors, and it has given us the opportunity to feature a range of work in the magazine that, up until now, didn’t fit comfortably into our format.

I hope you'll find everything on offer in the following pages as stimulating, thrilling, and moving as I do. As always, your feedback is welcome.—Tod Lippy