Season in Hell with Rimbaud

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 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.

“If, as Rimbaudtells us, believing you’re in Hell means you’re there, A Season inHell with Rimbaud is Dustin Pearson’s Dantean descent. NoVirgil, 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/ abrother. 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 distantcosmologies, poetries, theologies. But it’s also decidedly granular—sheetspulled up over a headboard, geysers, a red balloon. Pearson has written anunforgettable story of two brothers and the myriad universes roiling betweenthem: ‘If the only world is a Hell with my brother / in it, being with him willmake a new one.’”—Kaveh Akbar, author of PilgrimBell