The White Place
In the story "My Aztlan: White Place" the narrator talks about his childhood home as his White Place. The mythical place of Aztlan is known as a place of safety, home place of Aztecs, which makes this entire allusion ironic because the narrator's White Place is the place where he suffered devastating emotional and physical abuse and where he essentially couldn't be himself, which should be the point of home.
Child Abuse
The writer has an understated way of describing child abuse, which in turn might be seen as problematic for instance, in the story "Baptism" where a father tries to assault his teenage daughter or the poem "At Risk where the speaker passively observes a mother abusing her child. The tone is that of hopelessness and acceptance of things as they are rather than of resistance.
