There is no "after," after Auschwitz. The gas hiss of certainty lurks in our souls, and it whispers the same old promise of a knowable, stable, external reality. And we still catch ourselves listening even though we know that the promise of a retrievable past, of transcendent truths culminates in efficiency, authority, and death. We have lived downwind from the ovens even before they were built, and the stench of evil does not wash from our clothes, our poetry, or our fiction. What we learned -- and our writers face -- is the reinvention of morality, a reinvention that cannot breathe the same aspirations that have left us adrift. What (our writers ask) is left once we have defended ourselves against the totalizing impulse that has festered since Plato? How do we counterpoise the necessity of irony against the imperative to live in the world? How, as one critic asks, do we create an unendorsed irony?
       John Freeman’s work does not flinch; it performs the paradox of that divided consciousness. His poems offer us iterations of a loved woman, iterations of a paranoia that we are forced to accept as our own, iterations of catastrophes and loves that are finally synthesized by a narrative consciousness that can endure the paradox of being "in" but not "of" the world. In the end, John’s work turns us inward to the heteroglossia that coalesces into the moral impulse.

             - Hugh Culik