The poet Charles Simic wrote, “Short poems: be brief and tell us everything.”

Edward Carson’s extraordinary new work gathers concise diptych – or twofold – poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence. Within the two sections of twofold, “dialogues” and “binaries,” the form of the diptych shapes language and meaning as paired poems engage each other across the margins of facing pages. Caroline Bem, author of A Moveable Form, writes: “The diptych, you see, is beautiful. It is symmetry and difference, doubling and mirroring, binarism and seriality. It is the form of paradox, both open and closed, free and contained.”

Negotiating surprising twinning combinations, comparisons, and outcomes, the poems in twofold are lively, thought-provoking, and playful interchanges that are also mischievously literate, questioning, and intuitive.

Edward Carson is twice winner of the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award in Canada, and is the author of a previously published book of poetry, Scenes. Over the past thirty years he has pursued a variety of careers involving the word, including co-founder/editor of the literary periodical, Rune, and lecturer in English Literature at the University of Toronto. He has served as president of several major book publishing companies, including Penguin Group (Canada), Pearson Technology Group Canada, Distican (Simon and Schuster), HarperCollins Canada, and, while head of publishing, founded the successful indigenous publishing list of Random House of Canada.

Throughout his publishing career he taught the business of publishing at Ryerson University, Humber College, and as co-director of the Banff Publishing Workshop. He also has participated on various Boards of Directors, including PEN Canada, BookNet Canada, and is a past president of the Canadian Publishers` Council. At present he is Chief Business Officer and Associate Director, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies.

Edward Carson's profile page

“twofold dazzles in form and content equally. The poems, deft and nimble and deceptively light, don't dialogue with each other so much as they call and respond. They are of two minds, two hearts, about many things, playfully but also with earnest intent, and as a collection they make a beautiful music of complexity and doubt.” Charles Foran, author of Just Once, No More

“The poems of twofold are constructed on a bedrock of two and three-beat lines and from this simple foundation Carson creates a fantastical architecture of music and metaphor. This edifice is cantilevered so each floor seems to float free from the one below. It is like walking daily past your favorite building and being amazed again by its cornerstone and its crenellations.” Ross Leckie, author of The Critique of Pure Reason and Gravity’s Plumb Line

“twofold imagines all the possibilities of between, from arithmetic ratio to the electric pulse of love throbbing one towards the other across fields of attraction and resistance. These poems build irresistible momentum through the narrow channels of their minimalist chains of words—they are infinitesimal particle accelerators where thought blinks in and out of valences like particles deciding to be waves, waves longing for particulate being. As Edward Carson seems to know so well, we wear ourself out trying to draw near, fold and refold the pleats of our hearts, ultimately yielding to the “undertow / of binary.” Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain

“Wonderfully intriguing, echoic and fun. With pared-down pairing and whetted wit, Edward Carson’s twofold tiptoes through the twos, crosses and recrosses that ancient border between mischief and wisdom. An agile bicameral ballet.” Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip and Lurch

“Edward Carson makes one want to write an essay about the genius of poetry. It would admire his poems’ pursuit of self-discovery, their own identities as fictions. It would remark how they try to grasp the present world (the world of online and AI and digital obfuscation) in all its impresence and pare it down to its metaphoric minimums. But then it would want to insist that, in the end, all of twofold is about metaphor, all metaphors being twofold by definition. It would celebrate the challenge of his work—in his method as much as in his subject matter—of holding two thoughts at once, which is both impossible and manifestly achieved in the poem’s own terms. It would note how threads of thought come near without joining, swirl around and away from one another. But the essay would exhaust itself trying to keep up, and in the end the poems would dance circles around it.” Jeffery Donaldson, author of Missing Link and Granted: Poems of Metaphor