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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 emigrated from Poland to the United States, and who also experienced grievous loss when her only son was killed by a drunk driver. These deftly interwoven stories offer a picture of mother and daughter finding strength in themselves and each other in the face of tragedy.
"[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
"Beautifully written." - Booklist
"Starred Review. An unexpectedly hopeful, but never mawkish, tale of love and loss ... Beautifully written, at just the right emotional pitch. Of interest to all readers but likely to find a home among bereaved mothers." - Kirkus Reviews
"Heartwrenching and radically honest." - Dispatch Magazine
"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
"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
"Elegiac and wise, Poor Your Soul is, ultimately, about the strength of the human spirit." - Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life
"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
"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
This information about Poor Your Soul was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mira Ptacin's work has appeared in Guernica, NPR, New York Magazine, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The National Book Foundation, The Morning News, Tin House, The Rumpus, and more. She teaches memoir writing to women at the Maine Correctional Center and lives on Peaks Island, Maine, with her husband, Andrew; son, Theo; and their two dogs, Huckleberry and Maybe.
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