Maria Takolander's poetry presents the primitive aspects of human life in dramatic and uncompromising ways. She strips the world of easy sentiment, highlighting the visceral quality of experience, its nightmare hauntings, and its premonitions of disaster. The intensity of the poems, and their focus on the effects of violence, madness, degeneracy, despair, and birth, combine with a Gothic sense of beauty, and at times, a deadpan wit. The collection is divided into three parts, personal and domestic scenes, old and new worlds, and poems dealing with the cruelties suffered and inflicted by the human animal.