Poppy State
A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings
by Myriam Gurba
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Pub Date Oct 21 2025 | Archive Date Oct 21 2025
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Description
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
Advance Praise
“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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781643265148 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 224 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Debbie J, Reviewer
Once I got into the first few pages I really enjoyed this writing style. I loved the different stories and memoirs and really appreciated the style. Some confronting history. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.
Jasmine N, Reviewer
This is a fantastic read. Gurba's mix of personal stories and history on place had me hooked from the first page. I loved reading about rock collections, flowers, berries, and everything that encompasses. Inspiring and relatable, no matter where you are reading from. I enjoyed the focus on California. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the E-ARC.
Ioana M, Reviewer
This is my first time reading Myriam Gurba and it's definitely not the last.
There are layers and layers of goodness in this book. Reading it has been an enriching experience: culturally, gender wise and just for the pleasure of it. I adore the author's way with words, mixing languages, meaning and personal significance, rhythm and magic.
There are book you just cannot relate to. This was not it for me. Being in the opposite side of the world from the fantastic Californian soil, having a different culture, but living the millennial woman life I couldn't feel closer to this narative. While Myriam Gurba speaks for herself, from her labyrinth of experiences and references, she illuminates a global search for a new relationship with the earth, with the body, a deeper understanding and relationship with our ancestor, an old / new spirituality of living with it all.
I cannot recommend this book enough and I am grateful to have received it in order to share my view on it. This is a piece of art that reveals a very specific window in our culture and we'll look back to this becoming a classic and a point of reference.
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