Mortality.
Poetry is never far from death. In this collection, it's highlighted and in the forefront. The concept explored most in the collection is the way the mortality of our parents causes us to divinize the masculine and feminine aspects of our existence and to look for a God through our memories of our parents.
Life exists by causing death to lower lifeforms.
This is an obvious fact of the animal world, but in a world where we can order animals "pre-cooked," and never really encounter the living animal, maybe our culture has lost an awareness for the value of all life. The boy in the poem, "The Cleaver," is more than aware, and when he eats another living being, he eats himself. That's why he says, "I eat my man."
Our lives were set into motion by our parents.
Killing the father figure is a huge moment in the archetypal development of a hero, and this poetry can be seen as essentially that—analyzing the way his masculine and feminine perspectives of himself originated in the personalities of his parents. This theme is employed constantly, that we live on the shoulders of those who came before us, and their lives and deaths are a sacrament for our own existence. Therefore, the parental experience is a religious one, and the boy in the poetry treats it as sanctified.
God can be seen in the nostalgia one feels for one's parents.
The poetry treats the mortality of the boy's mother as the paramount image, giving it an entire poem just dedicated to the ecstatic, terrifying vision of watching one's own mother losing her hair as she dies of cancer. This image is the correct image to keep in mind in the development of religious beliefs, so the poetry would imply.
Heritage is what you make of it.
In many immigrant communities, there is a sad thing that happens when the children of those immigrants move on from the traditions and perspectives of the homelands. In one sense, that's perfectly natural, but as the poet shows, it's not the only option. By finding one's sense of heritage in the small intimate moments from their childhood, heritage is obvious. When the speaker was a child, he was eating crazy food at a fish market. That's culture being represented in the sense of self of the speaker. Heritage is a choice, a voluntary participation in one's own history.
