John Freeman is a writer, a literary critic, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and a recipient of the James Patterson Pageturner Award. His numerous works include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Planets, which features stories about the climate crisis from around the world. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Freeman lives in New York City.

The Blinding

by John Freeman

If we
could make
an atlas
of pain
most land
would be
terra incognita