Victoria Edwards Tester speaks as a woman who knows what it feels like to be censored and who defiantly resists self-censorship. Tester’s poems listen to the past and to creatures, land, and ghosts who most people can’t hear at all.

Her poems are rooted in New Mexico history but they transcend regional boundaries. She uses metaphor to reconcile what rationally doesn’t appear to belong together. Her work is an attentive intermingling of imagination and intuition, weaving together landscape, choice, accident, love, and tragedy.

“A great joy radiates from Miracles of Sainted Earth, Victoria Edwards Tester’s startling debut volume. I felt lifted up and transported by this book of animal and ancestral spirits, of holy inner and outer landscapes, of our mysterious earth, sacred territory of the human soul.”

—Edward Hirsch

“Miracles of Sainted Earth is an extraordinary work. Like the most precious gemstones, Victoria Edwards Tester’s poems are created out of earth, fire, water, and something other — that intangible, indefinable quality we call genius. These poems stun me.”

—Jane Candia Coleman

“The best of these poems create a powerful imaginative fusion of landscape and history. There are passages of real brilliance in this writing, evidence of an original writer at work. The collection as a whole is an extraordinary achievement that deserves a wide audience.”

—Robert Minhinnick, Poetry Wales

Victoria Edwards Tester is the winner of the Academy of American Poets Brazos Bookstore Prize and the Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship for Poetry. She lives near Silver City, New Mexico. Miracles of Sainted Earth in the first in the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series published by the University of New Mexico Press. Victoria Edwards Tester’s poetry is rooted in New Mexico history, but transcends regional boundaries through an attentive intermingling of imagination and intuition.