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
