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.

January

An iPoem

by John Freeman

I cooked pasta
with chilies last
night and my
fingers still
burn. It’s how the mind
feels these days,
you say, upon
arrival, and we
sit with this. I
am so angry
I cannot
touch you.

From The Park (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).