Poppy State

“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

“A complex and thought-provoking title, brimming with insight and reflection. This is for readers interested in personally grounded writing on ethics and ecology.” —Library Journal

“Poppy State demands that readers take notice of the world around them, understanding both its beauty and its potential for betrayal.”—Booklist

“Myriam Gurba is an artist in the purest sense, and this offering will show you a new way to see the world and your relationship to it.”—The Stranger

“Gurba returns with a powerful new work…a striking meditation on the connections between the human soul and the natural life surrounding us.” —Alta Journal

"California Chicana essayist and novelist Myriam Gurba cultivates a literary terrain that blends memoir, botany, mythology and sociopolitical critique in this moving book about girlhood memory, ecological meditation and cultural history. Gurba constructs a labyrinth of language where California poppies, childhood witchcraft, and feminist rage bloom side by side."—USA Today

"Gurba’s lively storytelling immediately engages inter­est, but ultimately, it is her courageous vulner­ability that has a lasting impact…Poppy State is a book of self-empowerment that blossoms in hope, light and color. It is also compelling social commentary that traverses diverse, thought-provoking paths without losing clarity or purpose. Wander through the book’s pages as an observer and you will be intrigued, entertained and informed. Linger in the garden with Gurba, gathering from the book’s bounty, and you will come away changed."—Bookpage

“The heart and soul of this book are the plants, and how Gurba has been reshaped by her past and present relationship with them.”—The Orange County Register

“Poppy State documents Gurba's passage through the labyrinth, from soul loss to spiritual and physical reclamation. In our fractured, perilous times, may Gurba’s journey be instructive to us all.”—The Rumpus