The Symmetry of Fish

By: Su Cho, Paige Lewis

Narrated by: Su Cho

“All hits no skips. I was incredibly moved by these poems.”—Roxane Gay, via Goodreads

From National Poetry Series winner Su Cho, chosen by Paige Lewis, a debut poetry collection about immigration, memory, and a family’s lexicon

Language and lore are at the core of The Symmetry of Fish, a moving debut about coming-of-age in the middle of nowhere. With striking and tender insight, it seeks to give voice to those who have been denied their stories, and examines the way phrases and narratives are passed down through immigrant families—not diluted over time, but distilled into potency over generations. In this way, a family's language is not lost but continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew, with the power to cut across space and time to unearth buried memories. The poems in The Symmetry of Fish insist that language is first and foremost a bodily act; even if our minds can't recall a word or a definition, if we trust our mouths, expression will find us—though never quite in the forms we expect.

©2022 Su Cho, Paige Lewis (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Cho's] constructions and powerful content will surely appeal to all those who love poetry. Beyond the investigation of cultural and national languages is [the] family lexicon: how do we express ourselves to each other, what do we hold onto, what must we release as we make our way into a new life, a new world?”—Chicago Review of Books

“In her debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish, Su Cho presents us with a speaker who attempts to separate seemingly unlike things: the religious and flippant, the fishbone from the flesh, herself from her memories. In one poem Cho writes of a desire ‘to isolate these moments / pipette them into test tubes / whirl them in a centrifuge.’ Lucky for us, this turns out to be an impossible endeavor. Instead, we are graced with a glorious combination of the incompatible—Slim Jim crosses are treated with same reverence befitting any sacred relic. The speaker manages to be both an objective observer—recording the stories of family, friends, ghosts—and an unintentional catalyst—dropping an armful of fruit or choking on a fishbone and disrupting the silence of a moment, putting her own mark on the memory. ‘This is a collection of accidents,’ Su Cho writes in The Symmetry of Fish. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”—Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck