Poppy State

"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

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, part study of place.

Gurba traverses themes of language, power, ancestry, and California's ecology, in masterfully constructed sentences that seem to defy gravity, in the structure of a labyrinthine secret garden. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, and is ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

As a child, Gurba helped her father plant a garden at their "house on the hill" overlooking the strawberry fields where he spends his days as an educator for the children of migrant workers. 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, emerging from a dented can of El Pato brand enchilada sauce filled with courtyard dirt.

Through walks in the Angeles National Forest, she visits oaks, crows, elderberries, and sycamores, foraging for acorns, flowers, and berries to place on her altar at home, inviting the plants to write with her. Poppy State is a riveting tour de force that asks you to read it once and immediately read it again.