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.

Signs

An iPoem

by John Freeman

Chestnut buds green the trees. How
time operates on the mind, winding
it like a clock, when we believe
we’re the ones tuning it.

From The Park (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).