Móni Garcia Reviews Su Cho's The Symmetry of Fish

In her poignant debut collection The Symmetry of Fish, Su Cho immediately establishes a speaker spilling with desire even before the demarcated sections begin, a water-movement that permeates the rest of the poems. Cho explores how stories from the familial, folklore, memory, and language thread through each other and are constantly rewoven through each retelling/reiteration. 

Organized into three sections, Cho crafts poems that engage with questions of language always at their core: how can language become a form of re-entry, not only as a way of accessing the self and memory, but as a way to challenge hegemonic violence that comes with the imposition of English as a dominant language? What does Korean as a language critique, but also open? The collection is populated by a series of “word” poems, words in Korean that include multiple meanings in English, which Cho unravels through the telling of familial narratives. In her poem 사랑니: (N) Wisdom Teeth, she writes:

After thinking all my molars 
were dead, they smile–exclaiming
That it’s time to get my 사랑니
out. I point again to my wisdom teeth
because 사랑 means love,
not wisdom, in case they take
the wrong ones out.

The deconstruction of the word for wisdom teeth allows the speaker to return to the child-self and that frame of mind and it also becomes a moment of play. The speaker folds and unfolds the word as a way to critique English’s inability to move in that way as well. How else could wisdom become so easily braided into love? To be taken apart, and still keeps its center? 

The collection also engages with an array of other forms that demonstrate a kind of mastery, from the Abecedarian, to the aubade, and the odes that populate it. Cho creates an economy of language—each word is meant to pierce, a bone dug out of the body of a fish. Food also becomes its own form, its own language, not only the content inside the food itself, but how it’s made, and what is learned in its making and unmaking, such as in the poem, “Hello, My Parents Don’t Speak English Well, How Can I Help You?”:

Once I called her stupid for
Packing my field trip lunch with
Quick sesame rice balls even though that’s what I
Requested. That isn’t true. I called her
Stupid after she hit me for low grades in English class.

There is a triangulation of wounding that is held firm with the anchor of food: the speaker calling their mother stupid in both instances, the mother physically harming the speaker for the low grades, and the speaker’s difficulty to vocalize the truth of their words not only to the audience, but to the self. This is all done from the memory of the sesame rice balls, and something that is so carefully constructed. What is the violence, too, that comes with the imposition of English and the shame that becomes pervasive not only in what exits the mouth, but also sometimes what enters, in the shape of food? 

The mouth, as repeated throughout the collection, is crucial for the interpretation of language, the way it constantly shifts from the moment a word leaves the body to the moment it reaches someone else, a beloved. The mouth is a point of origin, but also a site of longing, “I wish you could borrow / my body to say water. / this is the easiest way /  I can help you say 물 / because I could never help my parents / say girl, ice cream, parfait.” We as readers are rendered unable to fully hold the word in our mouths which can only be done via the speaker themselves, much like the speaker is only able to gesture towards with their parents. Here, touch and language only brush against each other briefly, but the poems in The Symmetry of Fish ache to become a bridge.

Móni Garcia is a poet from Kankakee IL. They are a current MFA candidate at Arizona State University, and an Associate Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. They were a 2021-2022 recipient of the Mabelle Lyon Award and the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award in Creative Writing. Their work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2022 New Voices Contest, and they've had their work published at Voicemail Poems, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.