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.