How do our stories transform as they are passed down to each generation? Prize-winning poet Su Cho explores the legacies of language and lore in her unforgettable debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish. Selected by Space Struck author Paige Lewis for the National Poetry Series, these poems trace the narratives and phrases of a Korean American immigrant family with absorbing tenderness and curiosity. Cho threads stories of food and folktales through her meditations on joy, grief, friendship, faith, and coming of age in the middle of nowhere. This inventive debut illuminates how language is not lost over generations but distilled into potency— continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew.
In this conversation, Su Cho discusses her debut collection and the emerging tradition of Korean-American poetry.
Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish casts such corpuscles of light to the Korean and Korean American imagination. Cho’s poems invoke the tongue’s memory to give language to the unnamable: 가시, 밤, 쌀, 살, 사랑니, 봉숭아. Lightness and stillness expand with each word—and from every malady emerges a cure. —E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others and A Lesser Love
Tuesday, October 11, 2022 | 6 PM (EDT)
The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017
About the Speaker:
Su Cho is a poet and essayist born in South Korea and raised in Indiana. She has an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University and a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has served as the editor-in-chief of Indiana Review, Cream City Review and has served as guest editor for Poetry magazine. Her work has been featured in Poetry, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and Orion; the 2021 Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies; and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Poetry Fellowship, recipient of a National Society of Arts and Letters Award, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently an assistant professor at Clemson University.
