Dustin Pearson: A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

The poems in Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud form an allegorical travelog chronicling two brothers’ mutual descent into hell. When the older brother runs off, the younger brother begins roaming Hell’s different landscapes in search of him. Pearson leads his speakers on a speculative, epistolary journey through the nether realm.

“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. [He] 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

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, 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, the 2019 John Mackay Shaw Award from the Academy of American Poets, and of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at Florida State University.

Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation:
A Season in Hell with Rimbaud
A Family Is a House
Millennial Roost

This virtual event is streamed via Zoom.