Reviews

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 his 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. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision.
—Martin Dyar, Times Higher Education

Make It the Same is in many ways a breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies.
—Mark Byers, Review of English Studies

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. . . . 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.
—Walt Hunter, Los Angeles Review of Books

Jacob Edmond’s Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media is a compelling study of what he calls “copy poetry” . . . Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.”
—Michael Leong, Contemporary Literature

Make It the Same establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information.
—Anatoly Detwyler, Modernism/modernity

Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholars and students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched, and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study of iterative poetics in the works of diverse poets of different backgrounds and cultures, and an important and timely addition to the growing scholarship on global literature that moves beyond the binaries of East and West, center and periphery, singularity and repetition.
—Yanhong Zhu, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews

Make It the Same . . . belong[s] to a new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression.
—Ada Smailbegović, American Literary History

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.
—Justin Quinn, Times Literary Supplement

Edmond’s Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship.
—Sarah Dowling, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

The Brathwaite chapter—with its confluence of close reading, historical contextualisation, media analysis and postcolonial critique—typifies the rest of Edmond’s book: Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods.
—Vincenz Serrano, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 

Edmond . . . provides a fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas.
—Kate Gale, Choice

With his attention to conceptual and performative poetics, and the ways in which poems are created outside the traditional codex book and publication structures in both digital and predigital forms, Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship.
—Bartholomew Brinkman, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies

Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media is an important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. Via a finely curated selection of poets and their work, Jacob Edmond compares the ideas ‘original’ and ‘copy’, offering insight into the iterative work of particular socio-geographical contexts that highlight, but do not necessarily capitulate to, the prevailing capitalist system.
—Tasha Haines, Landfall Review Online

One of the implications of Edmond’s tracing “a common turn to repetition and reproduction among diverse poets working in three global languages” (2) is that we study “non-Western, peripheral, or global modernism” not “to uncover non-Western writers’ imitation of Western literature in order to make their work legible to the West”: rather, “copying and mimetic desire are not signs of non-Western derivativeness but qualities shared equally by non-Western and Western modernism.”
—Lucas Klein, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature

Through an innovative and thought-provoking string of arguments . . . . he shows convincingly how repetition through copying determined by new media is a process where precisely the repetition may open readers’ eyes to a new cultural reality dominated by globalised media for any production of meaning today. He also demonstrates how this kind of poetry engages with cultural issues that characterise the norms and values of a culture nurtured by the repetitive logic of media-determined globalisation as they are recycled time and again in prejudices with regard to gender, race, class, ethnicity, hybrid identities and so on in the contemporary media landscape . . . [Make It the Same] triggers new ideas and makes way for new comparisons. This review aims primarily to demonstrate this potential in Edmond’s inspiring volume.
—Svend Erik Larsen, Orbis Litterarum

Make It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical “mode of production” prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception.
—Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies

Make It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in America speak of “the poetry world” to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies.
—Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium

With its revisionist echoes of Pound’s “make it new,” Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a “copy poetry” that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature!
—Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time