This was a good choice for my read-a-poem-every-morning-and-night routine, because Harryette Mullen wrote Urban Tumbleweed in a similar fashion, except I believe she did a poem every day which took a year and I read 2 pages every day which took about a month. But this was meditative in the sense of you're supposed to let thoughts come to you without judgement (or so I've heard, I've never meditated). So in that sense, Mullen is truly meditating on the things she depicts every day... from nature to pop culture, true crime to daily life, not judging anything as 'bad' or 'good', but just depicting it as she sees it. This is a worldview that I think I will try to adopt for a change.

There are a lot of nature poems in this collection, which made it a fitting replacement now that I've finished my big Mary Oliver book, but there's also a lot about Los Angeles, a city that I don't know much about. It's an effective portrait of LA culture, and some of the more dystopian parts about celebrity culture or technology reminded me of books like "Something New Under The Sun" by Alexandra Kleeman. It's not that Mullen exaggerates things in this book, but when you put a microscope on something like "Octomom" or Venice Beach, the grotesque is put front-and-center. But maybe this is my bias creeping in, and she's merely depicting Californian culture as part of its environment, something that the title "Urban Tumbleweed" encapsulates. ( )