Hot & Sour Mag

One of the things that binds us Southeast Asians together is our natural landscape. It has offered us and our ancestors the ingredients that make up the food that nourishes us—food, it seems, that practically no one else in the world has the tongue or the mettle for. Enter Hot & Sour Magazine, a poetry magazine named after our love and longing for dishes that riot with flavor on our tongues. As with food, the poetry here speaks of our connection with our homes and how we endure the physicalities of our fraught lives and histories: with bottomless warmth and kindness for each other.

For the record, not all poems here are about food; someone was just hungry when brainstorming for lit mag names. Nevertheless, Hot & Sour Magazine embodies the fruits of community. Its production is a collaborative effort between the folks at Sing Lit Station (Singapore) and SEA Lit Circle (online). The poems in it exhibit each author’s voice and perspective, as prompted by the 2023 Southeast Asia Poetry Writing Month (SEAPoWriMo) moderators Lyrical Lunacy (from Bangkok) and The Brunei Writers. To further live up to every author’s vision or intention, each piece has been workshopped by the writers in this magazine in an empowering and respectful author-led setup. And finally, coming full circle, Lyrical Lunacy and The Brunei Writers appraise the poems as a way of giving thanks and reveling in the magic of our connections.

Here’s to poetry for our tongues.

—Stephanie Shi, SEA Lit Circle

When we approached SEA Lit Circle, we had little more than vague ambitions to publish some of the works from SEAPoWriMo 2023. We are so grateful to have found kindred spirits on the other end of our Zoom call, who shared our commitment to community and the idea of SEAPoWriMo as an ever-evolving, dynamic space. They challenged us to rethink conventional approaches to curating literary journals and instead prioritise the creative process.

SEAPoWriMo started in 2018, when we dreamed up a platform to bring writers from all over Southeast Asia together to share our ideas, developments in the scene and explore our cultural heritage. Peer feedback is a cornerstone of our community, and it’s something we take immense pride in—whether it’s in our prompt challenges or this very publication. To call Hot & Sour a literary magazine almost feels too formal, too frigid for the kind of sweaty, perpetual work-in-progress attitude that we crave.

Instead, we hope Hot & Sour Magazine is your invitation to take a breather and savour the warmth of our connections. As you browse through these pages, delight in the lively dialogue of our poets with their moderators as they respond to the prompts, with their peers as feedback shapes their work, and again as the moderators respond to their workshopped pieces.

— Karisa Poedjirahardjo, Sing Lit Station

EDITOR

Stephanie Shi is a Chinese Filipino writer who explores her relationship with herself, her family, and art through essays. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Tiger Moth Review, diaCRITICS, Spellbinder, The Lumiere Review, Anak Sastra, The Ekphrastic Review, After the Art, and 11 x 9: Collaborative Poetry from the Philippines and Singapore, among others. She enjoys nurturing communities, embroidery, and watching cat reels. Born and raised in the Philippines, she now lives in Switzerland. Website: https://bit.ly/StephanieMei

ARTIST

Theo Itchon is a nonbinary poet and a creative writing teacher. They collect tattoos, order the same three things in every restaurant, and try daily to watch as many horror films as possible. They live in the Philippines with their cat, Kaz.

EDITOR

By day, Lio Mangubat edits books. By night, he runs a weekly Philippine history podcast. One day, he’d like to work on his own fiction.