Poppy State cover art

Poppy State

A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Pre-order: Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Poppy State

By: Myriam Gurba
Pre-order: Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Pre-order Now for £7.99

Pre-order Now for £7.99

Confirm Pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

“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 listener 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. And 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 listen to it once and immediately listen to it again.

©2025 Myriam Gurba (P)2025 Timber Press
Essays Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science
No reviews yet