A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

Reviews / Votes

"If, as Rimbaud
tells us, believing you're in Hell means you're there, A Season in
Hell with Rimbaud is Dustin Pearson's Dantean descent. No
Virgil, no Beatrice, but a brother-one who could 'clap a boulder to dust,'
whose presence augured the world: 'There wasn't a time/ I didn't have/ a
brother. When/ my eyes opened,/ he was already here.' It's an epic story,
braiding planes of mind and spirit, reaching across time and space to distant
cosmologies, poetries, theologies. But it's also decidedly granular-sheets
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 of Pilgrim
Bell "Dustin
Pearson's oneiric A Season in Hell with Rimbaud is 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 Pearson's 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 of The 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
Rimbaud is 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