Joy Deng’s poignant and vivid narrative about love, loss, and memory explores the symbolism of flowers, particularly the rosy dipelta and peonies, as the protagonist grapples with the echoes of a past relationship. With themes of grief, nostalgia, and the passage of time, the tale is a meditation on how small moments and details can carry profound emotional weight.

Still feeling out of place at her university, English major Joy meets Nan, the intriguing but divisive girlfriend of her classmate Matt. While Joy's roommate Blair sees through Nan's "liquid gold" persona, Joy remains curious.

In this vivid poem Laura Newbern employs stunning imagery of harsh winters and Orthodox churches that accompany a reminiscent story of childhood.

Zhou Hau Liew’s “Quarantine Hotel” is a lyrical ekphrasis, as if a quarantine hotel were an installation art piece that places participants after the whip and before the lash of a sudden global pandemic, triggering ethereal eidetic imagery across space and time.

Acclaimed American poet, Sarah Arvio is the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono Cantos, and Visits from the Seventh. Her most recent work is Poet in Spain, a translation of poems and a play by Spanish writer Federico Garćia Lorca.

Before Bernardine moved to Paris in the late spring of 1925, she had socialized regularly with the founders of The New Yorker. In Paris, she had big plans to use her love of the visual and performing arts to bring people together. In 1929, she left everything behind, setting out for Shanghai, where she would begin to write her own story.

Focusing on model Sung Hi Lee, writer Kaila Yu explore how the portrayal of Asian women in pop culture and media of the 1990s and 2000s contributed to the objectification of Asian women and the deep roots of Asian fetish, the repercussions of which still linger today.

Giant Ape by Lu Nei, translated from Chinese by Edward Allen from the 8th edition of TSLR. A short story from within a chapter of Lu Nei’s five-part work Mistwalkers 雾行者, published on Jan 1, 2020.

Sonja Srinivasan’s vivid telling of a senator’s wife taking the train out of D.C, a city founded on freedom, raised on decorum, and bolstered by propriety, for New York.

Chris Song’s translation of Ye Si’s “Amélie in Tuen Mun”. After graduating from high school, Amélie and her classmates moved to the city to seek their fortunes. While some joined Triads, committing robberies, and others took part in the Miss Hong Kong pageant, Amélie found work in a diner.

Criticism editor Carlos Rojas introduces the section's contributions, from global climate change, the Israel-Hamas conflict, the political-economic crisis facing contemporary China, and how we understand failure itself, describing the essays as observations as well as interventions into the phenomena they describe.

Comparative literature scholar Irving Goh focuses on the reality of failure itself. Noting that many scholars working in a burgeoning field that could be called failure studies tend to focus on failure as a path to eventual success, Goh instead proposes that it would also be useful to focus on failure as failure.

Read "Cycle" by John Yau, the prolific and accomplished poet, art critic, and curator who has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.

Read six transcreations from Chinese to English by Joshua Ip, a Singaporean poet, editor and literary organiser. Ip has published six-ish poetry collections, edited eleven anthologies, and co-founded Sing Lit Station. His latest book, translations to the tanglish (Math Paper Press, 2021) gathers contemporary and anachronistic translations of classical Tang/Song Dynasty poetry.

Seas and history are strewn with tales and remnants of tsunamis, cyclones, and rogue waves that defy our imagination and challenge our survival. Through millennia the ocean has been cursed for its fickleness and spite, blamed for death and destruction. The ocean, however, has a simple defense against these harsh accusations: it is simply doing the bidding of outside forces. Only when pushed is its fury unlocked.