Sze-Lorrain's work involves fiction, poetry, translation, music, theater, and the visual arts. She writes mainly in English and translates from Chinese and French. She also works with Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. She has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy. In 2007, Sze-Lorrain worked with
Gao Xingjian on a book of
photography, essays, and poetry based on his film
Silhouette/Shadow. Through
Mark Strand, whose work she would later translate into French, she found her poetic vocation, crediting him for having introduced her to poetry. Sze-Lorrain's debut poetry collection,
Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by
My Funeral Gondola in 2013. Her third collection,
The Ruined Elegance, was published by
Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2016 and was named one of
Library Journal 's Best Books in Poetry for 2015. It was also a finalist for the 2016
Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Published during the
COVID-19 pandemic, her fourth collection
Rain in Plural (
Princeton University Press, 2020) contains many "poems that resonate with a political undertone, and they often suggest in the midst of great threats we persist and continue our important work, aware we alone are not the only or even the most vulnerable. The poems care about the larger world and our current crises."
Rain in Plural was a finalist for the 2021
Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. In response to the pandemic in Paris, Sze-Lorrain wrote a setting of new poems
The Year of the Rat, set to music by
Peter Child for unaccompanied voices, and virtually premiered in February 2021 by the solo artists of the
Cantata Singers and Ensemble in Boston. Child collaborated with Sze-Lorrain again for her poem "Untouchable" in his song cycle
A Golden Apple: Six Poems of Intimacy and Loss (2023), premiered by
Tony Arnold at
MIT. In 2023,
Scribner published Fiona Sze-Lorrain's novel in stories
Dear Chrysanthemums. Set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York, following a cast of Asian women from 1946 to 2016, the critically acclaimed work of fiction "illuminates Asian women’s resilience across decades of personal, political, and economic upheaval." These "women’s stories weave together in understated and inventive ways" while "the novel serves as "a multilayered meditation on intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience."
Dear Chrysanthemums has been longlisted for the 2024
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Sze-Lorrain practices Japanese and Chinese
calligraphy and ink work. Her poems and translations, handwritten in
ink, were exhibited alongside ink drawings by Fritz Horstman from the
Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation in the art show,
A Blue Dark, at
The Institute Library (New Haven) in 2019. ==Critical response==