In 1982 Song entered a rough draft of "Picture Bride" into a poetry competition ran by Yale University. Song received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and Yale published her work the following year, proclaiming her a "pioneer among a generation reexamining its heritage." She followed this book with several poetry compilations, "Squares of Light" (1988), "School Figures" (1994), and "The land of Bliss" (2001). Song received several awards and honors, such as the Pushcart Prize, and Richard Hugo has compared Song's poems in "Picture Bride" to flowers, stating that they are "colorful, sensual, and quiet, and they are offered almost shyly as bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most."