“a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach”: Times Higher Ed. on Make It the Same

Martin Dyar has reviewed Make It the Same for Times Higher Education. The review begins:

At first glance, the poetry that Jacob Edmond has written about in Make It the Same could appear to be precariously inclined towards abstruseness. And a significant number of the poets whose work is explored here have not been previously granted such thorough critical attention. But Edmond draws his subjects out brilliantly, revealing abundantly relatable dimensions of meaning and achievement within worlds of textual, visual and sonic density and, most importantly, worlds of poetic copying. With great detail, and in an impressive historical and biographical narrative mode, which serves to balance a broad theoretical range, Make It the Same catches and amplifies the nuances of individual poems, setting down supple paraphrases and interpretations based on oftentimes breathtaking levels of attunement to 20th-century and contemporary poetry.

And it concludes:

The flexibility of his approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. In addition to developing an illuminating vocabulary for the discussion of the ever-presence of the internet and the global digital economy, he accesses profoundly the often forgotten element of lyrical substance in postmodernist, avant-garde and multimedia work. He achieves this while speaking for the foothold that poetry has maintained since the advent of online life, even when it is combatively immersed in a new world that tends to disregard its claims to freedom, not to mention its continuity with the oldest impulses of literature itself. Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision.

You can read the full review here.