twofold
Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, April 2024
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
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movingparts
Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, March 2023
Edward Carson’s movingparts is truly “a temple of dapple in a tempest of cause.” His preoccupation with how our minds work—how they are sparked by desire and emotion—treats us to urgent explorations, like his meditation on Aesop’s fable of the fox and the crow. Carson turns that encounter over and over in his hands to create a brilliant sixteen-faceted jewel, each surface polished by investigation, analysis and poetic wit. He then presents fourteen sonnets that are “detonated” by lines from other poets, and that meld desire memory anatomy. And, finally, with exquisite control of his craft, Carson walks with Sappho through the terrain of the erotic, discussing “the physics of craving.”
– Maureen Hynes, author of Sotto Voce
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whereabouts
Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, August 2021
In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind.
“In whereabouts, Edward Carson’s remarkable poems form a network of synaptic connections that put a mind into question and reveal a mind in the act of questioning. In these poetic maps and countermaps, thinking is unmoored from conventional thought and reimagined as an “atlas of emotions,” as “a weather of its own making.” These are poems to get lost and found in.”
– Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic
“The poems in whereabouts offer a fascinating peek into a mind at work, one that is perpetually seeking to escape itself, to find union both with the world and with another mind.”
– Ryo Yamaguchi, Poetry Magazine / Foundation, July 2021.
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Look Here Look Away Look Again
Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019
“The poems in Edward Carson’s stunningly original collection explore the intricate patterns of communication and response that unfold when we look at paintings, respond to music, read poems . . . Readers of Look Here Look Away Look Again will be looking in delight, again and again.”
John Reibetanz, award-winning poet, author of By Hand
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Knots
Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016
Poems of the mind and heart, and of their devious puzzles.
KNOTS confronts the needs, dualities and riddles of the mind and heart, laying down themes of memory and art, reason and belief, intimacy and desire. Actively engaging the nature of thought and our always unpredictable, evolving experience of love, we discover that neither mind nor heart are quite what we assume.
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Published by Véhicule Press 2013
Birds Flock Fish School sees language as an example of emergence, the spontaneous interaction by which birds flock and fish travel in schools. These shimmering poems—that try to ease the reader out of accustomed ways of understanding nature, mortality, loss and love—articulate a vast, roving philosophical curiosity channelled through urgent form. Using a voice both sophisticated and simple, these poems invent a new way of perceiving, a world where “everything unites, at odds with itself.”
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About Edward Carson
Edward Carson is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award in Canada, the University of Toronto St. Michael’s College Award for Excellence in English Literature, and is the author of Scenes, Taking Shape, Birds Flock Fish School, Knots, Look Here Look Away Look Again, whereabouts and movingparts. In 2010 and again in 2019 he was Writer in Residence for Open Book Toronto. His work has been long listed for the CBC Literary Awards