Pricing
Paperback $18.95
Description
Poor Your Soul — moving, wise, and passionately written — is a beautiful reflection on sexuality, free will, and the fierce bonds of family.
At twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she embraced the idea of starting a family and became engaged to Andrew, the father...
Poor Your Soul — moving, wise, and passionately written — is a beautiful reflection on sexuality, free will, and the fierce bonds of family.
At twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she embraced the idea of starting a family and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed that her child would be born with a constellation of birth defects and no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate the pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Mira’s story is paired with that of her mother, who also experienced grievous loss. These deftly interwoven stories offer a picture of mother and daughter finding strength in themselves and each other in the face of tragedy.
Media
“Poor Your Soul is an important entry into the canon of the modern female experience—unflinching and specific, Ptacin examines love, grief, family and personhood with clear eyes and an open heart. ”
—Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers
“I read large swaths of Poor Your Soul, breathless, tears held (mostly) at bay, that feeling like someone was standing on my throat. Not because it is unbearably sad (though it's sad) but because it was telling me something true about being human, something that might have otherwise remained secret. This is a beautiful, contradictory book: big-hearted and hard-hearted, angry and introspective, drowning and triumphant, and suffused with humor both dark and light. It's a book about learning how to embrace what you didn't want, how to grieve when it's lost, and how to forgive life — and yourself — for the lot of it. ”
—Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
“In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Melissa Coleman, Mira Ptacin has written a funny and deeply moving memoir of loss, love, and redemption. Poor Your Soul is a story of an American family as unique and loving as any you'd wish to meet, and you'll be caught up in a gripping narrative, as Ptacin writes of her wild girlhood, her enterprising parents, the confusions of love and sex, and the brave choices women make, following their own good instincts. Elegaic and wise, Poor Your Soul is, ultimately, about the strength of the human spirit. ”
—Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life
“Vivacity of spirit, pungency and accuracy of observation, and a sharp, disabused, but nevertheless empathetic consciousness permeate her pages. Mira Ptacin soothes us, but she also, always, surprises. ”
—Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry
“Mira Ptacin invites her reader to viscerally experience her upbringing, to know her family intimately (and theirs is remarkable story) as she reveals, by one humorous and sorrowful turn after another, her journey toward finding her way in this very unsettling world. Hers is an immigrant's story in the most American sense. Reading her find her way through her most trying times left me feeling I'd found my own way through my own. There's no greater compliment I can pay. To read Poor Your Soul is to come to know its writer very well. Only the best writing does that. ”
—Cate Marvin, Co-founder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and author of Oracle: Poems
“Poor Your Soul takes us on a rich and vivid journey about the meaning of family with all its pain and comfort, loss and solace. Mira Ptacin writes with exceptional honesty and beauty, and I was deeply moved. ”
—Lily King, author of Euphoria
“[A] nicely paced, moving memoir of loss and renewal. Ptacin’s memoir is a raw and absorbing story of family fortitude and a young woman’s struggle to confront and accept the unexpected. ”
—Publishers Weekly on Poor Your Soul
“Beautifully written. ”
—Booklist
“Poor Your Soul is a beautifully written celebration of the love of family, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and the healing that comes after loss. Mira's very personal journey through grief is also a universal one.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Beautifully and candidly, Ptacin parses the strength of attachment, the afterlife of grief, and the often-tortured path to becoming a grown-up. ”
—Vela Magazine on Poor Your Soul
“If there is any upside to grief, Mira Ptacin gradually uncovers it in her moving and eloquent memoir, Poor Your Soul. ”
—Portland Press Herald
“Poor Your Soul paints a conflicted, coming-of-age story, one of perseverance through the bonds of family in the face of grief. ”
—Battle Creek Enquirer
“As a writer, Ptacin ploughs through this landscape of unbearable sadness with surprising vigor and even more unexpected humor. The portrait of her indomitable mother — who herself had lost a child — shines particularly bright and provides an example of how to survive the unthinkable, how to move forward through sheer force of will, in a world riven by an unfixable wound.”
–The Boston Globe on Poor Your Soul
“This vivid memoir tells of an unexpected pregnancy, ultimately welcomed, then threatened by birth defects that preclude life outside the womb. Far more than her personal story of abortion, Ptacin's brutally honest account incorporates her own mother's tragic loss of a child. ”