The poems in Pink Moon examine powerlessness over the body as well as in the environment. They explore the Western North Carolina area inhabited by the Cherokee, focusing on local inhabitants and lore, before reaching outward to other geographies: Egypt, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, in patterns of circularity and juxtaposition. Ranging over varying subjects—the Tuskegee experiment, the Ku Klux Klan, sexual and physical abuse, love both transgressive and domestic, familial patterns of incest and greed—Pink Moon uses the environment Tina Barr inhabits, and the virus that inhabits her own body, as bridges to the virus in the body politic. They illuminate the idea of contagion, positing the issues of race, and species extinction as an epidemic.