“This week’s inspiration is grief and strange beauty: Jason Hrivnak’s The Plight House, a stunning, deadly book. It’s just so sad and odd and gorgeous.

It is even pleasing as a physical object, all by itself. Published by Pedlar Press out of Toronto and with cover art by Tom Poirier — the book’s official website banner shows it off — it has high-quality, laid paper (with visible chain lines), and the layout of the book leaves plenty of negative space: a book design success.

The content itself is divine.”

“Bright and alienated youths never really go away and neither, of course, do their scars. That’s the great thing about taking as one’s subject matter the experiences — sickness, insanity, violence, love — that nobody comes through unscathed. The readership of such material isn’t defined by conventional demographic criteria, but, rather, by each individual reader’s willingness to journey into a territory filled with peril, perhaps even pain.”