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MANDORLA BOOKS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE
OUR FALL RELEASES!

Here the world is turned upside down to meet our eyes staring downward instead of upward, and outward. Here poems meet you where you are, and return your vision to a world loaded with wonders and laughter, if you’ll just take a few moments to look and listen and breathe it all in. That’s one way of explaining the joys, surprises, and detours that you’ll find in Eve and Other Acts of Defiant Gratitude. In Donohue’s new work of poems and prose poems, all personal history and all life itself is seen as a continuum of elliptical conjunctions. The past and the present, magic and loss, creation and cremation coexist. Shakespeare and Texas Cafeterias, Michael Cohen and John Donne, Joni Mitchell and conversations stored in a giant freezer. In these pages, people and events are all conjoined because in Donohue’s retelling, and reconfiguring of The Garden of Eden story, Eve be-comes the way to all creation in this world, the progenitor of love and art. Her decision isn’t just consequential, it’s courageous, and wondrous and liberating. While Adam was content to laze about and name the animals in The Garden, Eve wanted to taste creation itself. Because of Eve, we know "that in the syntax of the soul, there is no handwriting that misspells our desire to share ourselves with another, to become love." In this book, even when life has defied our expectations, we see how we can defy it back with an act of discovery and a sense of gratitude.
Sallie Stratton thought she knew what she was getting into when she married a military man--a life of following him wherever he would go. What she hadn’t counted on was that the day would come that she would not only be unable to follow him, she wouldn’t even be able to find him--he had gone missing in Vietnam. It would be 7 years before his presumptive death was made, 28 years before his remains were recovered and another 2 years before she brought him home. In those years when Sallie lost Chuck, she found herself, coming into her own, from a mother and homemaker to an activist, a student, a career woman and an adventurer.

"After her husband's plane crashed in Laos during the Vietnam War, Sallie Stratton was convinced he was still alive and a prisoner of war. As years went by, she struggled with how she and her three young sons, living in Dallas, could move forward without leaving Chuck behind. As emotionally powerful a story ever written about the families of the missing and unaccounted-for in Vietnam, Sallie's journey ultimately takes her on a path of her own choosing: A way forward without forgetting her past."

-Dave Tarrant, Enterprise Writer for the Dallas Morning News
Dog-catchers seldom get their due, and they do more than catch dogs. “Animal Control Officer” doesn’t quite catch the full meaning of the job either. Other animals besides dogs can be involved—pigeons, ferrets, goats, cats, monkeys, snakes, squirrels, rats, and the occasional Bighorn Sheep. More than a few surprises happen in the course of a normal workday or night. At least they did in the 1980s when Linda Mack, Animal Control Officer Two, patrolled the streets of Seattle.
 
Linda was not raised by wolves, but their descendants were always family. Living and working with dogs and with other animals was more enjoyable than a barrel of monkeys. Besides being fun, More Than a Dog’s Tale recognizes that animals are medicinal, and good dog medicine can’t be beat as a natural remedy for many of the bumps and maladies of real life.

"More Than a Dog’s Tale is a collection of stories by the Seattle dog catcher who has a top tier IQ, and a heart that’s even bigger than her mind. Animal lovers be forewarned! You won’t be able to put this book down. You’ll fall in love with every manner of animal, and the dog catcher who saves them, and saves herself. Within these pages are true stories of rescue, of love, and of what matters in life."

-Kit Kirkpatrick, Certified Memoirist

EARLIER 2019 RELEASES

Jaffa Frank transmutes her decades of suffering from endometriosis by engaging the mythic imagination to craft a narrative of hope and empowerment. Firmly grounded in the physical realities of the disease, she evokes its archetypal wisdom as a visitation of the Gorgon Medusa revealing healing and wisdom, even when medical cure is unavailable. Frank mythopoetically weaves together threads of endometriosis, Medusa, and Athene on the loom of her own lived experience of the disease, imaginative and embodied reflection the weft and warp of a life tapestry. By personifying endometriosis as Medusan, pathology is rendered sacred. By contemplating what it means to be human in embodied relationship with the divine, Frank provides a mythos of healing while living with chronic illness. 

Eyes of the Gorgon will be of interest to anyone who has been touched by endometriosis and longs to expand the story of the disease beyond the limitations of socio-cultural taboos and the medical model. It will be illuminating reading for analytical, somatic, and depth psychologists; students of myth and mythopoesis; and medical professionals.

From the introduction of Everyday Reverence:

"Everyday reverence is an attitude we bring to the world that seeks to see the spiritual everywhere, in all our values and activities and experiences, in all people, and in the whole of the sensual and natural worlds. To practice everyday reverence is to see all of nature as an altar, to perform any activity as worship, to hear the sensual world as a hymn, to view people as fellow pilgrims on a holy path, to seek experience rather than dogma, and make of our values a creed."

After offering an introduction to each of the one hundred ways, Selig curates a selection of quotations from wildly divergent sources meant to inspire and encourage us to experience the sacred every day out in our every where world.

Somewhere in the gap between the sacred and the profane, Deborah's poetry emerges to bring us into a more intimate relationship with the divine presence within and all around us. Her debut collection, SOUL BIRD, evokes a natural and accessible form of mysticism--each piece a poetic song of the soul, encouraging the heart of her readers (as well as her own) to awaken and take flight.

This book will bring the magic of mysticism back into your everyday life, help you to rise above self-imposed limitations, and cultural conditioning, and (re)inspire a holy pursuit of love and wonder that is only yours.
Jay Balter did not have an easy life growing up in mid-20th century Brooklyn. His father, known to his mother only as “that son of a bitch” was many things—a music publisher who gambled away the entire family fortune he made on Broadway, a philander, a gangster, a deadbeat dad—but mostly, he was absent. Jay comes of age in the Orthodox Jewish community of Crown Heights with his mentally ill twin sister, his angry older brother, and his beloved mother, an early feminist who will do anything to support her family. In 1958, at 18 years old, he enters the US Army. During his basic training in Georgia, Jay’s anger over both American racism and the European Holocaust comes to the surface, and he vows, “I was prepared to teach those rebels a lesson. I was not prepared to roll over and play dead like the Jews of Europe.” But after his medical training, he suddenly receives his deployment orders: to Nuremburg, Germany of all places. Not only that, but Jay finds himself living in the SS Kaserne, the former military barracks of Hitler’s elite Storm Troopers, sleeping in the very bed where Hitler was rumored to have slept. While there, he begins having dreams of revenging the Jews and assassinating all Nazis not convicted in the Nuremberg War Trials, and experiences an intense split between the healer and the hater within.  Will Jay start WW 3, or will he keep the peace in Germany?
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