The Pine Effect

Andrea Spofford's debut poetry collection locates self within geographical experience, examining the intersection of person and place. Addressing themes of history, transformation, and youth, this collection explores the idea of poet as alchemist and scientist, explorer and observer. "Somehow, Andrea Spofford has made emotion science, and science emotion. Everywhere in this collection is the pleasure of learning more than you were prepared for, and of leaving learning behind in favor of transformation...These transcendently wise poems show how life muddles designations like 'natural' and 'human, ' 'coeval' and 'historical.' They converse with astronomy, ecology, meteorology, seismology, zoology; they leap into the adulterated mix." -Angela Ball

"Andrea Spofford's debut collection is an engaging eco-poetical Bildungsromanin which Nancy Drew becomes a verb, traversed geographies stretch from hippodromes to sandstone caves, and vantage points move from the naturalist's eye to the panoramic gaze of an explorer compelled by the personal histories of place.'I want to tell you about sinking ships-Andrea Doria, Monitor, RMS Rhone./ I want to tell you about black holes, twenty-million bats in darkness'- Spofford's meticulous and striking images lead us to want to hear about it all." -Rebecca Morgan Frank

"A deep and luminous mystery lies at the heart of Andrea Spofford's striking debut collection, The Pine Effect. Her voice is by turns headlong and meticulous, urgent and careful. As much about place and identity as it is about language's transitory beauty, this book scalds and brands with its imagistic richness and leaves me dizzy, delighted, and freighted with the sense that the unknown has been made partially known-and that the indefatigably mysterious warrants celebration. Spofford's lines are more than gorgeous: they blur and clarify, growl and sing. The element of fire sparks and conflagrates throughout the collection, as in the poem "Cindy Avenue" "the shadowed tree, oaks / covering hillsides at your house / the same as the one my neighbor / caught afire, the one that burned, pluming / upward into alarm, everyone / rushing and water, the tree itself / later only shadow in daylight / reaching, a ghost." Spofford's first book is paroxysmal, breathless, and beautiful, teeming with flame and shadow." -William Wright