
I am very grateful to the TLS and Justin Quinn for this review of Make It the Same, even though my book is written precisely against the kinds of simplistic dichotomies, between past and present, “experimental” and “traditional,” that Quinn invokes at the end of the review. The review, however, opens with a nice summation of some of the book’s key motivations:
How can we understand poetry now that it travels so mercurially beyond the old enclosures? In Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media, Jacob Edmond sets out to make sense of the situation via the concept of “iterative poetics”, where the material means of transmission of the work is central to its meaning. Also, today’s critics, the study implies, should be alert to the ways in which putative “peripheries” have their own substantial powers, and are not forever doomed to wait for word from the metropolis about the state of the art.
Read the full review here.