Picture Bride

Picture Bride, Asian-American author Cathy Song’s debut collection of poems, was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1983. Song creates short, lyrical, and loosely narrative poems through her use of connected metaphors and images to discuss subjects such as motherhood, family relationships, Asian and Asian American heritage, and femininity or womanhood. The book is organized into five sections, each representative of a flower found in the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, who influences the style and language of the collection.

Song's poems are often about journeys – journeys from childhood into adulthood, from one continent to another, from one role as a woman to another, more unfamiliar or troubling role. This is particularly true in the title poem of the collection, “Picture Bride.” While American and European readers might imagine this phrase as a positive, romantic one, calling up ideas of a “picture-perfect” wedding, in Asian culture, this phrase has a different, and much darker meaning. The poem is written in the voice of a third-generation Asian-American woman about her grandmother, who was a “picture bride.” Her grandmother was wedded through an arranged marriage to an Asian immigrant man in the United States, whom she had never met. The term comes from the letters and photographs that are exchanged between the betrothed woman and her husband across the world –in this way, the woman becomes a “picture bride.” The poem discusses the differences in life from this generation to the speaker's own life, reflecting on the legacy of this marriage, and its lasting impact on generations of women. The speaker imagines herself as her grandmother, traveling across the world to live with a strange man whom she now must call her husband.

Song explores the relationships between mothers and daughters in her poems. In “The Youngest Daughter,” a girl becomes her sick mother’s the caregiver, struggling when the responsibility of mothering becomes her own, and their roles are reversed. In other poems, Song examines the sensuality of femininity, softening her language, focusing more on lyricism than a particular narrative or event. In some of these poems, she channels the voice and musings of painter George O'Keeffe, who paints gorgeous, lush flowers in stark, desert landscapes. Two poems, “From the White Place,” and “Blue and White Lines After O’Keeffe,” particularly speak to this artistic and imagist sensibility in Song's work.



Song is interested in art and image in other poems – in “Untouched Photograph of Passenger,” she looks at another photograph, describing it using vivid language and metaphor. In other poems, she describes winter, as in the piece “January,” which includes images of windows, a heartbeat, and thick, blue ice. Song also demonstrates her artistic eye through the use of color in all of her poems – she creates a vivid landscape in each poem, whether narrative or not, upon which feelings and other senses are projected.

Overall, Song is interested in beauty and delicacy, and in the resilience and wonder of life. Though her poems often probe difficult subjects about what it means to be an Asian-American woman, her work is soft, delicate, and focused on the peculiar and beautiful nature of what it means to live in the world.

Cathy Song was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Chinese and Korean parents. She attended Wellesley College and Boston University, where she received an MFA in Creative Writing. She won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 1983, and Picture Bride subsequently was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Interested in the multiplicity of identity, Song resists being labeled as only Hawaiian, Asian-American, American, or female. Instead, she writes about these subjects to spark a broader and more unique view of the world. Her books include Frameless Windows, Square of Light, School Figures, The Land of Bliss, and Cloud Moving Hands.