A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

(Paperback)

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First printing: 2,000 copies. A Season in Hell with Rimbaud is Dustin Pearsons third poetry collection. His previous two collections, A Family Is a House and Millennial RoostIn the trend of Silvia Garcia-Morenos Mexican Gothic and Karen Tei Yamashitas Sansei and Sensibilities, Dustin Pearson reframes the Western literary canon in a diverse retelling of the travelogue-through-Hell genre from the perspective of a Black American poet

. Along with its literary influences, A Season in Hell with RimbaudIn 2019, The RootThe title poem, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, won a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Another poem in the collection, Lying Down, was featured in the January 27, 2021 issue of The NationPearson served as the editor of Haydens Ferry ReviewStrong academic appeal for Black studies, linguistics, English/European literature, African American literature, and comparative literature departments.

Reviews

If, as Rimbaud tells us, believing youre in Hell means youre there, A Season in Hell with Rimbaudis Dustin Pearsons Dantean descent. No Virgil, no Beatrice, but a brotherone who could clap a boulder to dust, whose presence augured the world: There wasnt a time/ I didnt have/ a brother. When/ my eyes opened,/ he was already here. Its an epic story, braiding planes of mind and spirit, reaching across time and space to distant cosmologies, poetries, theologies. But its also decidedly granularsheets pulled up over a headboard, geysers, a red balloon. Pearson has written an unforgettable story of two brothers and the myriad universes roiling between them: If the only world is a Hell with my brother / in it, being with him will make a new one.
Kaveh Akbar, author ofPilgrim Bell

Dustin Pearsons oneiricA Season in Hell with Rimbaudis a carnal traversal. The flesh putrefies and bubbles. From cuts in the feet the blood leaks and puddles and muddles. Skin-splitting is a critical function of discovery. The hellscape lives, roils, and revolts per its noxious nature, and as the speaker threads it in search of their brother (in pursuit of themself), Hell gets inside you, becomes the body and what can happen to it, and remains strange: Pearson is a foreigner here, a traveler who does not arrive. I give thanks for Pearsons dream-walking poems with titles like hardcore band names, for how they mirror the interior wherein I am a fallible brother, a friend in the distance, a companion simultaneously corruptible and committed.
Justin Phillip Reed, author ofThe Malevolent Volume

You can lose your brother to Hell/ and still be happy inside your house, begins one of Pearson's striking and unforgettable poems. Pearson is at once metaphysical and allegorical. While summoning Rimbaud's symbolism poetics, he creates a voice uniquely his own, with questions of brotherhood, performative masculinity, and the horrors and vulnerabilities of our mortal bodies. There are many rooms to open in each of Pearson's poems.A Season In Hell With Rimbaudis a rich and thorough collection. Each time the speaker's brother is addressed, a history of violence and traumas that the brother has been subjected to in Hell is simultaneously summoned. But is hell another dimension, an internal space, an external space, or is it right here on earth Pearson keeps reminding us that, The house has many rooms, and we find meaning inside and out of each real, imagined and metaphysical space. What a poetic accomplishment this is!
Raymond Antrobus

Author Bio

Dustin Pearson is the author of three poetry collections: A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA, 2022), A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). His poems have been featured in Bennington Review, Blackbird, Hobart, The Literary Review, The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Poem-a-Day, Saranac Review, TriQuarterly, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2015 Katherine C. Turner Award and the 2019 John Mackay Shaw Award from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View. . In 2020, a film adaptation of his poem The Flame in Mothers Mouth won Best Collaboration at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival. Pearson holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a M.A. and B.A. in English from Clemson University, where he specialized in Ethnic American literature. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at Florida State University. He lives in Summerville, SC.