By Throat, By Miracle New & Selected Poems by Edward Vidaurre

Edward Vidaurre is one of our most uplifting poets and shining spirits. Everything he does is worthy of celebration. 

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Cast Away: Poems for Our Time and The Tiny Journalist

Edward Vidaurre fills his pen with love and rage and blood. Then he pours in music. And like Jimi Hendrix, when you least expect it, he sets it all on fire as he sacrifices his songs in our honor.

—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Piedra & Good Night, Irene

“Here he is, the newly crowned Poet Laureate of the Barrio: Vidaurre’s poetry is like the fine line of a jail tattoo, the detailed mural on a lowrider car, the jerky slow dance of a cholo. The poems swing to their own beats, yet carry style, color, and breathtaking beauty. ¡Son de acquellas, ese!”

—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running and It Calls You Back

"I love reading and savoring Edward Vidaurre's poetry. By Throat and By Miracle: New and Selected Poems shows the earthy as well as the ecstatic range of his poetry. I'm always taken to the borderlands with Vidaurre's poetry, to McAllen, to the Rio Grande Valley, but also to that liminal existence that is the air we breathe in la frontera. I feel I am reading my brother in words, and I can't stop listening to his magic on the page. Bravo."

—Sergio Troncoso, author of Nobody's Pilgrims and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

In his newest collection, By Throat, By Miracle: New and Selected Poems, Edward Vidaurre both praises and laments what it has meant to be a child of the barrio—whether tattooed teardrop or stray bullet or the mother’s hands that smell of pan dulce. The collection, composed of poems which are exquisitely diverse formally in their use of the page, span selections from eight poetic volumes published in the past decade. The book approaches its conclusion by asking a central question: “what sustains you/glowing crucifix in the night sky?” (“Moonchrist”), and its more than one hundred poems propel the reader on a quest, and a journey of witness to the concomitant brutality of barrio life and the fierce resilience of the Latinx community.  Women figure prominently here as cultural anchors and peace weavers—wives, mothers, sisters, daughters—as moon milk, river stones—love’s steadfast, sustaining power despite their wounds. The divine in nature too offers consolation—god as tree, trees as god, or the voice of the Rio Grande whispering. And the poet also turns to literary ancestors—Roque Dalton and “Corky” Gonzales, Cortázar, Lorca, and Ginsberg—as he interweaves languages and tones, moves seamlessly between Spanish and English, between the lyric and the oracular. These poems howl, they weep, they sing, they prophesy, that is, they carry within them the complex depth of what it means to be human. I have long admired the poems of Edward Vidaurre for their ferocity and tenderness, their precision of craft, and their deep wisdom—they are love in action. By Throat, By Miracle is the work of a profoundly wise poet at the height of his artistic power, and he has shown us what it means to live in the skin of another, and to love.

—Robin Davidson, 2015 – 2017 Houston Poet Laureate & author of Mrs. Schmetterling