THEY RISE LIKE A WAVE and Other Recent Publications

They Rise Like a Wave (book with a black cover featuring an abstract pink, purple, and blue image and wavelike linework in the background) propped up on a set of wooden outdoor steps.
My contributor copy of They Rise Like a Wave is finally here!

Happy end of APA Heritage Month. It’s been a busy spring! I’ve been so lucky to have had my work come out in a number of journals recently: Menagerie (which was kind enough to feature four of my poems, including a prose poem from a series whose form is loosely based on the experimental method and two poems written as sentence diagrams—a form I’ve been kicking around recently), Glassworks (based out of Rowan’s MFA program, and which took a poem about my childhood in South Jersey—it felt very full circle!), and last, but not least, Hyphen (which took a poem that I’ve been revising for over a decade—I couldn’t imagine a more perfect home for it, and getting to appear in Hyphen itself is a dream come true).

Perhaps most excitingly, though, two of my poems (including a persona poem from a series that started as an attempt to reimagine J. K. Rowling’s woefully flat portrayal of her sole East Asian character, Cho Chang) will appear in a forthcoming anthology, They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (edited by Christine Kitano and Alycia Pirmohamed for Blue Oak Press). They Rise Like a Wave has been in the making for several years and suffered a few delays during the pandemic, so it felt pretty magical to get to hold my author copy when it arrived recently. The anthology officially comes out on June 3rd, and you can preorder it via the distributor’s website here.

Happy Year of the Tiger!

Red hong bao envelopes with a design of an illustrated tiger holding a customizable sign. Around the tiger are flowers and text saying "Wishing you a stripe-endous new year!" Behind the envelopes is a sheet of paper containing an unfinished envelope (printed but not cut out). A pair of gold scissors sits to the right.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything here. But new year, new leaf. And I’ve got a few bits of writing news to share as the Year of the Tiger approaches. (Hard to believe that Lunar New Year is already a little over a week away!)

First, in 2021, I picked up and started submitting again. Over the summer, I got pretty lucky! Counterclock chose three pieces that I’d written during the first year of the pandemic to appear in its thirteenth issue as part of a special themed folio, “Outbreak, Part 2.” You can read them below. (Excitingly, I’ve already got three more pubs forthcoming in 2022—more to come soon.)

Three Poems by Iris A. Law (Counterclock, Issue 13, Outbreak, Pt. 2)

I also started 2022 off by getting new author photos taken! It had been nearly nine years since I shot the selfie that previously appeared on this website (and that I used on my chapbook). I was long overdue for a change. Photographer Elwing Gao shot my new photos right in my neighborhood and did a lovely job — I love how, in the final photo I’ve chosen here (you can see it in the sidebar), she was able to catch some pretty golden-hour light coming through the stand of redwood trees behind the local fire station.

Lastly, I think I’m going to start sharing some freebie printables here on this blog from time to time. I experimented with making my own hong bao (Chinese red envelopes used for Lunar New Year) this year, and they turned out so fun that I couldn’t help but want to share. Click on the link below to download a free printable design that you can use to make your own Year of the Tiger red money pockets.

Year of the Tiger Printable Red Envelope (PDF Digital Download)

Wishing you a healthy and happy 2022—here’s to fresh starts and following through on new intentions!

Two Poems in WILDNESS Issue 17

It’s been a long time since I last touched this blog! This comes as late news, but I’m happy to announce that after an (unintentional) two-year hiatus while my attention was focused on classroom teaching, I’m back to working on my manuscript and submitting again, and at the end of last year, I was fortunate to be featured in my first journal publication since 2016. In December 2018, I was lucky enough to have two poems picked up by wildness, an exquisite and ethereal online lit mag out of the UK’s Platypus Press.

One of the pieces they took, “Book of Hours,” is the (current) titular poem from my still-in-progress full-length manuscript; it’s an elegy for my dad, one of a number that are written after particular psalms.

The other piece, “A Skein of Geese,” comes out of a fun project that I began over the summer. For the past few years, I’ve been working with middle school writers, and I love to assign them poetry exercises that will spark their imaginations and cause them to think about language in new and surprising ways. Last June, as I was returning to my own writing practice after such a long time away, I decided that it only seemed fair to assign myself the same types of prompts I like to give to students. I practiced writing with “synesthetic description.” I tried writing with more attention to smells (that oft-neglected sense). I wrote some poems that dug into my Harry Potter fandom. And I borrowed evocative terms of venery (collective nouns) for animals and used them as titles, imagining the possibilities of what could happen if, for example, a hover of trout could really fly—or, in the case of the poem that wildness took, a skein of geese could really embroider the fabric of the sky.

I’m grateful to Michelle Tudor of wildness for taking a chance on me and my little experiments. And I’m even more thrilled that these, my first published pieces in over two years, appear in the same issue as an interview with my dearest writing friend and LR partner, Mia Ayumi Malhotra. (Whose first collection, Isako Isako, came out last fall and who, as usual, has endless pearls of wisdom to share in the interview!)

If you have a moment this weekend, I’d be grateful if you’d hop over to wildness 17 and give the issue a little love!