The Orchard Street Press is pleased to announce the release of The Gambler’s Daughter, the exciting new collection of poems by Mary Makofske of Warwick, New York.
Priscilla Orr, author of Jugglers & Tides and Losing the Horizon says of The Gambler’s Daughter:
“Stunning are these poems in their music, their imagery, and profundity exploring our most deeply
felt experiences, even to the time when ‘life that one of us/has lived, at last/discharged, burns out/like stars along the synapses.’”
J.R. Solonche, author, most recently, of Selected Poems 2002-2021, observes: “Mary Makofske’s new collection takes us on her journey from daughter to wife to mother to grandmother in twenty-nine
exquisitely wrought poems documenting a life both full and fulfilling…..Makofske has indeed accounted for all she owns, from the spendthrift gambling father to the daughter’s thrifty heart. And for what she shares, we are grateful.”
Ginny Lowe Connors, author of Without Goodbyes, says: “The wild heart that beats through the poems here may be wondering if we are not all the children of gamblers, if life itself isn’t one big gamble. Life is hard, whether it is the girl realizing that her longed-for doll can hardly do more than mechanically walk ‘the path laid out for girls,’ the grandfather passing down an ambiguous legacy, or the woman in “As a Bruise Changes Color,’ who finally ‘ leaves victimhood behind and walks out the door,’ Mary Makofske, brilliant poet of this evocative collection, clearly says life is worth the gamble.”
Mary Makofske’s books include World Enough, and Time (Kelsey, 2017) and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry East, The American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Spillway, Southern Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Stillwater Review, Whale Road Review, Crosswinds, Earth’s Daughters, Blueline, Verse-Virtual, Quiet Diamonds, and other journals and in nineteen anthologies. She has received the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize, and the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize from The Orchard Street Press. A retired professor of English (SUNY Orange) who has also worked as a travel agent, health educator, and reporter. Mary lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. She and her husband designed their energy-efficient solar home and tend a large garden.
The Gambler’s Daughter is available, both online and via the mail, for $14, from:
The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280; Gates Mills, OH 44040
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. www.orchpress.com (web)