A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

by Dustin Kyle Pearson

Overview

In pursuit of his brother, a man traverses the fantastical and grotesque landscape of Hell, pondering their now fractured relationship.

The poems in Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud form an allegorical travelogue that chronicles two brothers’ mutual descent into hell. When the older brother runs off by himself, the younger brother begins roaming Hell’s different landscapes in search of him. As he searches, the younger brother ruminates on their now fractured relationship: what brought them here? Can they find each other? Will their bonds ever be repaired?

In the tradition of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Swift, Shelley, Joyce, Sarte, and especially Arthur Rimbaud, Pearson leads his speakers on a speculative, epistolary journey through the nether realm inspired by Christian beliefs and tradition. Drawing on the works of French Symbolists and the literary traditions of the American South, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud guides readers through an intimate rendering of one brother’s journey to find his lost and estranged brother, perhaps recovering a part of himself in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950774593
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Series:	American Poets Continuum Series , #193
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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 Mother’s Mouth” won Best Collaboration at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival. Pearson holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State Universityand 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.

Table of Contents

I

A Season in Hell with Rimbaud 11

II

Regardless, 15

Watching My Brother Sleep in Hell, a Memory Reminds Me This Too Is Bonding 17

My Brother Outside the House in Hell 19

A Dependency 21

The Day I Told My Brother That Despite It All, I Found a Way to Be Happy 22

Things I've Thought, Things I Do 24

Pain on a Soft Surface 26

Hell's Conditions 27

Dying Aspects 28

A Forgetting Statement 29

A Search Through Liquid Fire 30

Whirling 32

Beacon 33

Lying Down 36

Human Devices, Unsupervised 39

The Breeze 41

III

Hell Swallowed 45

Sasquatch 46

Prayers and Preservation 47

Another Bed in Hell's Ocean 49

In Hell's Ocean I Come upon a Man Wanting His Sons' Approval 51

At Some Point, Light Lets Through 53

IV

Fossil Fuel 55

An Overgrowth Besides the Body 60

In Hell's jungle, a Knock to No Eye 62

My Brother's Two Screams 64

A Difference 65

Things I've Thought, Things I Do 66

A Scheme 68

In the Center of Hell's jungle Is a Massive Tree 70

Still a Loss 72

V

Souls Side by Side 77

Hell's Wide Net 78

Murky Water 79

VI

The World at Its Beginning 85

Acknowledgments 88

About the Author 90

Colophon 96

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher