If The Man Who Finds His Own Voice was Sa-ard’s way of questioning what it takes to pursue one’s dream, Lifelong Poetry, another collection of short stories published a decade later, tenderly looks back at the years passed, journeys taken, love lost and found, the wounds we carry — all of which continues to unfold and shape who we are in the present. These stories leave us suspended between the soft edges of nostalgia, as depicted through Sa-ard’s whimsical lines and shading, and hard-boiled moments of truth that are sometimes hard to swallow in the absence of self-deprecating humour.

This collection of short stories comprises the vignettes of five ordinary lives: a man who forces himself to forget the losses of his childhood friend, his old lover and his amnesiac grandmother, but reunites with all of them in his dreams; a broken high school friendship that ended with betrayal finds the possibility to mend itself again 8 years later; a struggling comic artist attempts to rediscover her love for comics, only to find that the comic artist she idolises had lost the fire of his youth, but the joy that started it all remains with him in unexpected ways; a woman in her thirties finds herself having to take on her family’s business and the responsibility of caring for her father with anger issues; the eventual discovery that our first experience of heartbreak and loss, while it can morph into a fear of relationships, can eventually evolve into something more fulfilling if we learn