“a radical contribution to poetry studies”: LARB reviews Make It the Same

The Los Angeles Review of Books has just published Walt Hunter’s review of Make It the Same. The review concludes:

Edmond’s book makes a radical contribution to poetry studies. For Edmond, the agent of poetic change is not the individual, but rather the shifting collaboration between technology and politics that produces different kinds of copies. Poetic style has sometimes been read as the development of a poet’s mind as it self-consciously struggles with the conditions that shape it. In Make It the Same, the history of poetry comprises a large cast of nonhuman actors. The implication is that the poetry scholar might not know in advance all the factors that contribute to the emergence of poems. Poems, in turn, might reveal more about the political laboratories of globalization than has been widely understood. The publication of Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well — its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian — but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next.

Read the full review here.