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, ...

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birth, the chapters in this book reflect on the local, national, and international significance of his remarkable life and legacy in relation to his specific commitments to socialism and democracy.Written with contemporary conditions in mind, such as the current political period of economic inequality, the debilitating reality of exploitative economic conditions, an expansive and invasive surveillance state, the grotesque in...

the body / knows what / it truly / wants yet / the mind / wavers allIn Edward Carson’s provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what’s true and what’s not in Aesop’s fable "The Fox and the Crow," as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what’s said and what’s not about identity and intimacy in Sappho’s lyrics.Reflecting the moment-to-moment ways our minds think, these poems take us from a creat...

the body / knows what / it truly / wants yet / the mind / wavers allIn Edward Carson’s provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what’s true and what’s not in Aesop’s fable "The Fox and the Crow," as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what’s said and what’s not about identity and intimacy in Sappho’s lyrics.Reflecting the moment-to-moment ways our minds think, these poems take us from a creat...

in the poem / of the world / there once / was a map / of the map / composed in / the likeness / of a poemIn this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other.Taking on cartographic distortions and dyn...

an orientation of thought in thinking how a / thought begins and then travels on to arrive / at another place connected and like-mindedA work of art is never entirely present in itself but rather is always at large in the mind of the viewer. So it is that a painting needs to know the simplest question those viewing it are asking themselves. From the intimate starting point of observer and observed, Carson's seductive, exhilarating new collection turns poetry and paintings, making a...

an orientation of thought in thinking how a / thought begins and then travels on to arrive / at another place connected and like-mindedA work of art is never entirely present in itself but rather is always at large in the mind of the viewer. So it is that a painting needs to know the simplest question those viewing it are asking themselves. From the intimate starting point of observer and observed, Carson's seductive, exhilarating new collection turns poetry and paintings, making a...

The mind is made / of pleasures and / uncertainty, inviting / as it yearns to be both / puzzle and adversityFull of philosophical digressions, questions, and answers, Knots forms a series of cyclical narrations, a kind of verbal asymmetry or mathematician’s knot, continuously mirroring its ideas and subject matter in a play of language and contrasting points of view."Flight of the Mind & Measure of the Stars" sets an itinerary and series of proposed directions for ...

The mind is made / of pleasures and / uncertainty, inviting / as it yearns to be both / puzzle and adversityFull of philosophical digressions, questions, and answers, Knots forms a series of cyclical narrations, a kind of verbal asymmetry or mathematician’s knot, continuously mirroring its ideas and subject matter in a play of language and contrasting points of view."Flight of the Mind & Measure of the Stars" sets an itinerary and series of proposed directions for ...

In this 10,000-word essay, written to complement Iain McGilchrist's acclaimed The Master and His Emissary, the author asks why - despite the vast increase in material well-being - people are less happy today than they were half a century ago, and suggests that the division between the two hemispheres of the brain has a critical effect on how we see and understand the world around us. In particular, McGilchrist suggests, the left hemisphere's obsession with reducing everything it s...

Aristotle wrote, "Well begun is half done." This is especially true for anyone struggling with learning math. Math is a different kind of subject from all the rest and requires that you understand the differences. If you don't, you will give up too soon and never master math. If you know the secret strategy and apply it from the beginning, you stand a better chance of developing good habits and a good approach to learning math right from the beginning.This short text (2,230 words) ...

If you are having difficulty learning math, you already know you are not alone. Many people struggle with math. In fact, it is the one discipline in which low grades and low performance are almost universally acceptable because they are so common. For example, a parent is more likely to excuse a lower report card grade in math than in any other subject because that parent probably got lower grades in math when he or she were in school.But why is math so hard to learn? If we look at...