A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

Dustin Pearson

I dreamt I was showing my brother around in Hell.We started inside the house.Everything was brown besides the white sheetsin the bedrooms. I let him lookoutside the window, told him it was hottest there,where the flames rolled against the glass,as if a giant mouth were blowing them,as if there were thousands caught in the storm,pushing it onward with mindless running,save a desperation for something else.How had there been a house in Helland we invited with time to spend? Why was itI hadn't questioned how I got there? My brothergrowing so tired from the heat, the sweating?Surely we could open the door, he said. Surely there'll bea breeze. Even seeing already, even burning himselfon the doorknob. His eyes turned back in his headworking his way to the bedrooms, stainingthe sheets with his blistered hands, and though I knew the bedsweren't for the rest of any body, I sat by and let him sleep.

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Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). In 2019, The Root named Dustin one of nine Black poets working in “academic, cultural and government institutions committed to elevating and preserving the poetry artform.” In 2020, a film adaptation of his poem “The Flame in Mother’s Mouth” won Best Collaboration at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a director of the Clemson Literary Festival. His writing has been recognized and featured by Shonda Rhimes and further distinguished by the Katherine C. Turner and John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards and a 2021 Pushcart Prize. His work also appears in The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird,The Boiler, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.

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Rochester, New York

“‘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, author of All The Names Given

“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

“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

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