In the beginning of Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings (Timber Press, 2026), Myriam Gurba describes the aftermath of a violent relationship, during which she floated from couch to couch before finally renting an apartment and beginning the hard work of healing from misogynistic abuse. Of this time, she writes: “I travelled so lightly it seemed I was … dead.” Poppy State, then, is a memoir of awakening—of reviving in the face of near extinction. It is both healing manual and Lazarus tale.
Gurba is a memoirist and essayist whose previous collections include Mean (2017) and Creep: Accusations and Confessions (2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 2019 viral essay famously called Jeanne Cummings, author of American Dirt, a pendeja. For these accomplishments, the Long Beach Post dubbed her a “literary luchadora,” and the Los Angeles Times called her “one of our great American intellectuals.”
In her new memoir-in-essays, Gurba also reveals herself to be a verbal sorceress. While her previous collections traffic in rage and biting humor, Poppy State, though colored by both, expands into the more healing, elemental territory of native California plants. The spells she casts in this latest tour de force inspire awe, fear, yearning, nostalgia, envy (at least in this writer), and a kind of radical curiosity.
Gurba begins her memoir with a Julio Cortázar-esque metafictional author’s note on different paths through the text, which she constructs as a “labyrinthine secret garden,” influenced by Jorge Luis Borges’s classic short story “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Her pen turns California into an enchanted landscape of flora and fauna. Wildly inventive, she fluidly crosses genres, from confessional memoir, to literary and cultural criticism—The Wizard of Oz, The Satanic Verses, porn, Saturday Night Live, and America’s Most Wanted all make an appearance in the first chapter—to fairy tale, ribald humor, California queer history (like the story of Jack Gunn, Valley Theater owner and father to the talented Gunn Sisters, one of whom later renamed herself Judy Garland) and travel journal.
As Gurba writes in her author’s note, Poppy State “ushers the reader through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.” It is also a “metaphorical habitat.” Just trying to pin down Gurba’s achievement feels like a Sisyphean task, because she jumps from idea to reference like one of the “pronghorn antelope that once ran wild among the Joshua trees.”
Gurba’s narrative voice is widely read, playful, allusive, wise, and knowing as “death … crouched in the cattails, waiting.” She works in her new apartment on healing her fragmented self into a whole and on developing her mysticism. In Chapter 3, “Burbuja,” (bubble) she describes creating a paper effigy of her abuser, whom she dubs the Marijuana Prince, and slowly dropping him into a pot of boiling water, then watching him recoil and burn. She is practicing her brujería, (witchery), a word closely associated with burbuja.
The eco-feminism that underlies many of Gurba’s observations colors her chapters with inventive metaphors. Death is “a skeletal doula” who plants calcified kisses on the narrator and blows graveyard dust into her mouth. Her time-traveling, metaphysical prose proudly proclaims both her Latin American literary heritage and her indigenous connections to California soil.
Troublingly, abuse is painted in terms of beauty. This unsettling masochism brings to mind Nabokov’s Lolita or Carmen María Machado’s In the Dream House. Like the psychoanalyst Alfred Ernest Jones, one of the many intriguing figures the book explores, Gurba “writes beautifully about nightmares.” As Jones once wrote, “it has long been recognized that even in the most terrifying nightmares, the angst often has a distinctly traceable voluptuous character.” The Marijuana Prince’s powers of enchantment are clear from the beginning. He employs plants as his “botanical accomplices”; her years lost to him are buried “like seeds.”
References to California native plants and animals blossom throughout Poppy State. There is the house on the hill in Santa María where she and her father planted oak trees and coyote brush. Her childhood talismans include an acorn, a snakeskin, a skunk whisker. Home is not just a place but a state of mind: “My body could better house my spirit if she also had a real home,” she writes.
Gurba is refreshingly honest about the role of marijuana in her writing. She reports that she was inspired to plant a corn maze in her apartment by the spirit of her grandmother, and by cannabis. Her evenings are spent “sharing hare-brained schemes with the moon and exposing [her] photosynthetic roommates to second-hand smoke.” Early on, Gurba reveals that Poppy State itself is her “conceptual corn labyrinth” that she is telling into existence and planting with her mouth.
Writing in the tradition of Chicana literature, Gurba celebrates working class roots and rasquachismo, or the art of making do. Like her grandmother, the apartment-dwelling Gurba is a “prolific indoor gardener.” A California poppy blooms on her windowsill, planted in an El Pato enchilada sauce can. One of her reminders of home is a dab of Vick’s VapoRub, a beloved cure-all in Latino communities. She writes of buying a starter home goods set at the 99-cent store, along with an armful of African Violets that revive her desire to wake up in the morning, and inexpensive ugly plants like gargoyles that she restores to beauty. The first chapter, “Maíz,” begins with a snapshot of mismatched ephemera: a porcelain bowl, a cockroach floating in a glass coffee cup, and a pack of American Spirits. She relates writing to her family’s traditional arts of corn cultivation and mud house or jacal building.
Gurba’s experimental literary theorizing, through which she deduces that books are plants, along with her unceasing delight in Spanish-English-indigenous word etymologies and puns, is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, whom she quotes in her prologue and whose influence can be found in many greats of Chicano literature, notably Sandra Cisneros. However, unlike Borges, Gurba identifies her ancestry with indigenous heritage and digs into Native American histories and epistemologies. She writes of the history of amate, the paper made from bark which the Spanish denigrated as “papel de tierra” or earth paper. She continues that Tenochtitlán was supplied with 480,000 sheets of amate a year, but that Spanish invaders torched the native libraries and archives and imported white cotton-based paper, after which amate went underground, and is still made in some parts of Mexico today.
In Poppy State, Gurba inscribes herself and her family’s arrival from Mexico to Santa María, CA, where her parents were schoolteachers and administrators, into the Chumash history of the land. More elementally still, she inscribes herself into its natural history, from the tarweed to the oak grove she plants with her Mexican-Polish father. “I crawled into [the California blackberries],” she writes, “and became a locust.” She inherits her environmental awareness from her father, who once “dug up whale parts and the remains of early horses,” and in the wilds of Orange County, “found pectens and other sea creatures that proved that California had once been an ocean floor.”
Gurba describes Poppy State as a “book-length condemnation of settler colonialism.” This is a major claim that also carries contradiction. In the chapter titled “That Mexican,” Gurba confronts one within herself: she acknowledges that her father’s promotion, and her ensuing move to a house on a hill, made her a fresa—a word that literally means “strawberry,” but is also Mexican slang for someone privileged or wealthy. (Indeed, most traditionally published writers, to enjoy the time to develop and practice the literary arts, possess some degree of fresa.) Another question that arose for this reader: how can we reconcile with ancestors who settled here from other countries, whether by choice or driven against their will?
In a recent article, Gabriel Hartley writes that Gloria Anzaldúa fashions herself as the curandera (medicine woman) of the conquest in Prietita and the Ghostwoman, where she provides both an example and an enactment of her practice as a curandera. The embrace, study, and practice of curanderismo and brujería are part of the magical turn in popular culture; decolonial and antipatriarchal, these practices seek to resuscitate ancient forms of female knowledge and power rooted in reverence for the land. Borrowing on Hartley’s phrasing, I suggest that Gurba is the bruja of the conquest, who seeks through spells, remedies, and nature itself the cure for the violence suffered by herself, her indigenous ancestors, and the earth.
Ever erudite, Gurba cites some of the most important contemporary scholars on indigenous studies, such as Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) whose writings on the California missions as prison camps and her own buried indigenous roots inform Gurba’s discussions of these Indian cemeteries, and Federico Navarrete, who points out in ¿Quién conquistó México? (Who Conquered Mexico?, 2019) that the Spanish conquest was actually Native-led, fought and translated by Native recruits and informants. Gurba attacks the misunderstanding that Spanish last names require Mexican or Spanish descent, since the adoption upon baptism of Spanish names served as a survival tactic for much of the indigenous population of the Southwest. Like seeds, native identity went underground. As Tongva science illustrator and educator Samantha Johnson proclaims in From the Ground Up: How Tongva Traditions Utilize Native California Plants, “E’kwa’shem (We are still here).”
Among many other things, Poppy State is a paean and a call to the cultivation of California native plants, a growing movement which the author’s father championed in his own garden. While the Bible gives humans dominion over the Earth, indigenous cosmologies seek the divine in nature, espousing an animistic view in which the heart-spirit suffuses all of creation. For this they were demonized by the Spanish as worshippers of crows and bird-gods. Yet it is a view also held by one of Catholicism’s most revered figures, St. Francis, who delivered sermons to birds.
Some of the tenderest scenes in the book depict Gurba’s father goading his children into uprooting the invasive ice plants and pampa grasses in their hillside yard in Santa María and taking them on camping trips to the Sequoias where he sings them spooky folk songs. The homecoming to Santa María that Gurba describes in the penultimate chapter is a coming back to her roots in family and in nature, along with a coming back to herself. It is also Dorothy’s journey from a drab Kansas of the soul to Oz.In her author’s note, Gurba offers a potent spell, a recipe for healing the effects of misogyny, of land theft, cultural erasure, and susto. Wildly inventive, her narrative persona alternately crouches, waits, pounces, and spins an entrancing web of words in which plants are humanlike, and humans, also plantlike, can be gods or monsters. She is by turns a bruja, a savage mermaid, Dorothy, and Goldilocks. She meets a curandera, a priestess, a plant man, a hemp man, a Marijuana Prince. Poppy State documents her 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.
