twofold

Edward Carson is the author of several poetry collections including movingparts, whereabouts, Look Here Look Away Look Again, and Knots. He lives in Toronto.

“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