UCLA poet and professor Harryette Mullen, whose last full-length book of poems, Sleeping With the Dictionary, was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, has just released a new book of poems.

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times picked it as a top book of the fall, and reviews of the book appear here, here and here. An excerpt appears here.

From the publisher’s website:

“Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, “What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?”

Mullen’s The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews appeared in 2012.