It’s hard to imagine introducing this issue by starting anywhere other than the four-line poem “Glaze,” by Isra Hassan. It chronicles, essentially, the fall — the leap? — of a glaze into the fire that will transform it.

In the latest of our postcard series on climate change, “Wish You’d Been Here,” David Trilling arrives at a river run dry on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In Andrew Cominelli’s “The Smoke Went Up,” pedicab driver brooks depression and hitches along with tourists in New Orleans pedicab, at least until disaster strikes. Itamar Vieira Junior, in translation by Johnny Lorenz, writes in an almost literary pointillism, sprinting through time, about mothers and daughters and one lost baby girl, in particular.

Plus poetry from Raymond Antrobus, Ana Carolina Quiñonez Salpietro, in translation by Tiffany Troy; unpublished “excerpts” from a new memoir about family and heritage, The Translator’s Daughter, by Grace Loh Prasad and a new novel about the love affair between two titan poets, The Swan’s Nest, by Laura McNeal; and in our Spotlights series, a short story whose monsters challenge a small community in Texas.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe, editor in chief