In the reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shut down, Juan Felipe Herrera began a daily practice to draw and write mandala poems. Through this new practice, Herrera created well over 500 mandalas, a series of circles that served as contemplations, concentrations, and transformations of his consciousness within the isolation. Herrera documents the loss, suffering, and challenges of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, an election cycle, as well as the onset of new wars and conflicts in Ukraine and into the present.
Through verse and visual art Herrera moves away from a journal of the day to day, and instead, through a commitment to continue to excavate the days, arrives at the center of the mandala wheel to discover kindness, compassion, and healing. The Cosmic Flow blends the dexterity of Herrera's poetic, artistic, and spiritual practices developed over the last 50 years and provides the reader with a path forward in spite amidst the heaviness of the world.
Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera's many collections of poetry include Every Day We Get More Illegal; Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. His book Jabberwalking, a children's book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth. He runs the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at Fresno State.
"Drawing is a physical search for meaning through form; a gesture that emerges from within and spills forth onto the page; a movement that enlists the entire body and soul. As the endlessly prolific Juan Felipe Herrera writes, 'We move, we churn, we turn our torso, we lift our legs + turn our feet, we scrape our ankles + press our thighs + our breast touches our arms + feet push the forces we shape counterforces…'—this is how we reach cosmic flow. While the pandemic forced us to endure long stretches of isolation and the loss of control, Juan Felipe was working, meditating, dreaming, reminding us that our bodies are sources of energy, that just by being we can tap into the infinite. Part artist's sketchbook, part poet's journal, this is also a manual for how to live, for how to survive." — Maceo Montoya, author of Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces
"I have always admired the inventiveness, kinetic energy, and communitarianism of Juan Felipe Herrera's poetry, all which are integral to The Cosmic Flow, a collection of visual mandala meditations written in 2020 and 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic, BLM Movement, and onset of the war in Ukraine. These circular poems inspired by Buddhist thought, quantum physics, and a profound love for humanity and the earth we inhabit, are without beginning or end. They are planets/universes rotating, calling us to 'begin again [for] nothing is there that was there now,' as a young daughter fleeing the Ukraine understands when she grasps a handful of gravel so she won't forget her country. One cannot help but become immersed in the intimacy of Herrera's handwriting, in his verbivocovisual vision of interconnection and its multidirectional flow where the paper, stars, flores, river, stream, migrants, Pachamama, and ancestors are sacred, are one, are all of us." — Brenda Cardenas, author of Trace and Boomerang
"This one has got the natto! Fragrance and sound rising off the page. Evokes a hang with Juan out in Berryessa in San Jo back in the 80's. He was chopping up the chilies for quesadillas. And more, the mandalas bring up Coltrane's notebook sketches that are GIANT STEPS. Bop. Bam. Slip. Slide. Soar. Been. Be. Here. Get into the ARK that is the COSMIC FLOW and meditate your way to that sea in springtime." — Francis Wong, saxophonist, Asian American Studies Professor (SF State University), community worker
