Poppy State

A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

By: Myriam Gurba

Narrated by: Myriam Gurba

From the award-winning author of Creep comes a powerful book by a writer at the peak of her powers—at once a love letter to California and a literary tour de force that tells the story of resilience and reclamation through a relationship with plants, memory, myth, and indigenous knowledge.

Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, and part study of place. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

Through the stories of these plants she comes to a new understanding of what occurs in the cultivation of a soul. Gurba learns if she can care for her body as she does her plants, her soul can thrive—like the California poppy on her kitchen windowsill. And through walks in the Angeles National Forest, she visits oaks, crows, elderberries, and sycamores, while foraging for acorns, flowers, and berries to adorn her altar at home. Poppy State is a riveting tour de force.

“The mother of intersectional Latinx identity.” —Cosmopolitan

"Scorchingly good."—Cheryl Strayed

“The most fearless writer in America.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist

"A truly distinctive, authentic, and dynamic literary voice. . . Myriam Gurba is one of our great American intellectuals." —Los Angeles Times

Critic reviews

“Like wandering a maze, the language in Poppy State opens to puns and image and history, building a landscape of poppies and oak trees, Chumash history and Spanish missions, grandmothers and great grandmothers, and curanderas wearing gold grills. This is Myriam Gurba at her most expansive and impressionistic.”
—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist for The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“I was bewitched, in the ways I wanted to be, reading Poppy State—brought under a spell that offered me greater clarity, a new sense of myself and others, of California, of plants, and purposes. There is some of the ordinary garden magic, sure, born of tending to the ground. But it becomes much more than that under Gurba’s incisive, guiding eye.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"A propulsive, unclassifiable book about ecology and self, Poppy State is as elegant and blistering as fire—and just as unpredictable. Gurba is the poet laureate of righteous anger and reclamation."
—Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House

dynamic storyline and unexpected sincere monologue

knowledge comes to us when most needed. Whether this book has found me or I have found it- I am grateful. I felt related to the author and the experiences and it would be hard for me to recommend this book to anyone, for it clicked with my soul and my life in places that I did not expect.
this book is worth the read at least for the dynamic storytelling and the sincere images. it feels like a talk between two friends that you accidentally overheard, a peek into a life that you weren't supposed to have, but will cherish because it sparked something in your own soul.
good work