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Fish Sauce Metonymy: On Vi Khi Nao’s “The Italy Letters” - Cleveland Review of Books

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“Going down on a woman reminded me of eating fish sauce,” proclaims Vi Khi Nao’s narrator in the author’s latest epistolary novel, The Italy Letters. The final lines of “Coital Exposure,” a poem from Nao’s luminous 2022 poetry collection Fish Carcass, wonder whether a “verdant penis” is “better with nước mắm (1) / The female organ as / Squid in liquid form.” Elsewhere, Nao calls her own body “cetacean” in “Lady Gaga Apples,” a poem from her 2021 collection A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line. In an interview anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading of 2018, writer Stacey Tran asked Nao what smell she associates with Asian people. She responds with a cryptic haiku: “Cherry blossoms printed on silk / Soaking in kwan loong oil / Dry shrimp under the tongue.” The Italy Letters is a similarly self-consumptive, epistolary novel: a long, unsent letter from the narrator (Nao’s stand-in) addressed to a married woman living in Italy who never learns of the narrator’s affection.

Fish Sauce Metonymy: On Vi Khi Nao’s “The Italy Letters” Jaye Chen · December 12, 2024 Vi Khi Nao | The Italy Letters | Melville House | August 2024 | 192 Pages “Going down on a woman reminded me of eating fish sauce,” proclaims Vi Khi Nao’s narrator in the author’s latest epistolary novel, The Italy Letters . The final lines of “Coital Exposure,” a poem from Nao’s luminous 2022 poetry collection Fish Carcass , wonder whether a “verdant penis” is “better with nước mắm (1) / The female organ as / Squid in liquid form.” Elsewhere, Nao calls her own body “cetacean” in “Lady Gaga Apples,” a

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