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Day 1, Pages 3-30

The following version of this book was used to create this Lesson Plan: Machado, Carmen. Her Body and other Parties. Graywolf Press, 2017. Paperback version.

• The Golden State opens with an epigram from the poet Philip Larkin: “Home is so sad” (1).

• The book begins the narrator Daphne describing her day in the present tense, as she stares out the window of her office at an institute in a university in San Francisco. She is thinking about death and remembering “the way Paiute smells in the early morning in the summer before the sun burns the dew off the fescue” (3).

• Daphne thinks about the home she has up in the high plains of Altavista, a double-wide trailer she inherited from her mother who inherited it from her parents.

• Daphne says that her uncle Rodney has been paying the utilities and keeping the place up while they look...

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