A Year of Favorites: Jason Diamond

It was cold the morning after it was announced David Bowie had died. Not surprising since I live in New York City and it happened in January. Yet I found myself standing outside my apartment around six in the morning, gym clothes on, not really dressed to be idling around. I put on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which I’ve listened to countless times since I was about 13, and simply referred to […]

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Encountering “The Violence of Living”: A Review of Mira Ptacin’s “Poor Your Soul”

Poor Your Soul, the debut effort from author Mira Ptacin, sets its sight on telling untold stories of women. The title, a delicious phrase taken from the idiosyncratic immigrant English of her powerful mother, signifies a complex, overlapping story of the bonds between two generations of powerful women dealing with death and the creation of life, using pain and suffering as the connective tissue. Ptacin, a native of the smaller Battle Creek, Michigan, finds herself beguiled by the glittering illusions […]

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