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Handful of Gravel - Ukraine Notebook 2023-2025 by Juan Felipe Herrera

$17.00

Herrera writes a poetic notebook of witness to more than 80 scenes of the Russian Occupation of Ukraine as if he were there, following the bicyclists being shot down on the streets, a mother and her two children mortared and fallen, mayors being dragged to an inferno, and elderly women tossing make-shift Molotovs at the T-72 Battle tanks. We enter the tiny rooms of citizens and notice the disruption caused by mercenaries. And we listen to the songs of Nadia outside, emanating hope and strength. Members of Parliament, we notice— their values, their daring. We continue to walk in the snow to the kind hands of Poland. 


This is a unique set of poems by Herrera, offering pages of truth and a child’s gravel at our door.


Herrera writes a poetic notebook of witness to more than 80 scenes of the Russian Occupation of Ukraine as if he were there, following the bicyclists being shot down on the streets, a mother and her two children mortared and fallen, mayors being dragged to an inferno, and elderly women tossing make-shift Molotovs at the T-72 Battle tanks. We enter the tiny rooms of citizens and notice the disruption caused by mercenaries. And we listen to the songs of Nadia outside, emanating hope and strength. Members of Parliament, we notice— their values, their daring. We continue to walk in the snow to the kind hands of Poland. 


This is a unique set of poems by Herrera, offering pages of truth and a child’s gravel at our door.


Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27, 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. As a child, he attended school in a variety of small towns from San Francisco to San Diego. He began drawing cartoons while in middle school, and by high school was playing folk music by Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Herrera graduated from San Diego High in 1967, and was one of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. There, he became immersed in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and began performing in experimental theater, influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Luis Valdez. In 1972, Herrera received a BA in Social Anthropology from UCLA. He has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and served as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at CSU-Fresno.In 2015, Herrera was named Poet Laureate of the United States, for which he launched the projectLa Casa de Colores, which invites citizens to contribute to an epic poem. Herrera is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Fresno and UC Riverside. He also holds honorary degrees from California State University, Fresno, Skidmore College, and Oregon State University. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2011 to 2016. He is the father of five children, and lives in Fresno, California, with his partner, the poet and performance artist, Margarita Robles.