On Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

A Season in Hell with Rimbaud by Dustin Pearson. Rochester, NY. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 96 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Dustin Pearson’s collection A Season in Hell with Rimbaud finds itself in conversation with Rimbaud and influenced by Dante as the speaker goes on a Dantean journey through Hell in search of his brother. Despite the influence of tradition that is evoked throughout Pearson’s poetics, this collection reexamines the Hell narrative as the Hell lyric that navigates a relationship between brothers and questions the world at both a beginning and an ending. Pearson’s Hell becomes both grotesque and dreamlike that leaves the reader questioning how much is dream and how much is Hell. The poems in this collection also explore who we are to another, or who others are to us.

“Who in your life would you walk through fire for?” asks Pearson’s speaker in the first of two poems titled, “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do.” The speaker is asking this question of his brother; however, the poet also acknowledges the reader and asks them to ponder this question of themselves, too. The speaker’s own vulnerabilities are put on full display throughout the poem when Pearson writes, “The thought of asking that question used to bother me, having to listen to a list that didn’t include me, // or thinking the one name you’d say wouldn’t be mine.” In the final section of the poem, the speaker begins to confront their own fears, “Brother, I never thought my answer would be you. I’m not disappointed like I thought I’d be.” This poem becomes an acknowledgement of love, but it’s hard to not feel the sadness with which it leaves the reader, too.

This prosaic diptych of poems becomes a sort of confessional refrain after the second “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” builds upon the first which helps to anchor the book. The repetition allows the speaker to negotiate the Hellscape Pearson offers to his readers through the speaker’s search of understanding not only their brother, but themself. These sectional poems offer a breadth of space on the page as the speaker searches inward, “These days when I sift through the past like this, when you’re lying next to me on the bed before you’re lost again, I’m trying to tell you what I will miss.” This final line of “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” guts the reader with the speaker’s raw confession, once again, to their brother and leaves the reader contemplating their own histories, relationships, and what they are unwilling or unable to say.

Pearson’s speaker remains confessional and vulnerable within these poems. However, at times, this confession leaves the inner exploration of the speaker and feels as if the poet is speaking directly to the reader. “The World at Its Beginning” leaves readers with a tenderness. In it, Pearson’s speaker concludes: “I tell myself / I’d follow him anywhere / to keep the world / from ending.”

The last four lines of “The World at Its Beginning”––and the last four lines of Pearson’s Hell Lyric––become a compassionate reach from the speaker to his brother, from the poet to the reader. The poet is prevalent throughout the invention that is this collection which makes for another juxtaposition of speaker and poet. With the diptych of poems “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” and the final poem “The World at Its Beginning,” the self-searching chants through the outward compassion and both juxtapose the darker images that wander through many of the other poems in the collection. The speaker has been giving us the vulnerabilities, but it is the poet who has given us the realization of the final lines that end this collection. Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud is an epic lyric worth entering Hell for.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

What We’re Reading, with Assistant Editor Mays Kuhail

I’ve been enjoying reading more poetry over the summer, and I’ve recently picked up If They Come for Us, a raw and poignant collection by Fatimah Asghar. I was instantly drawn to the rich themes of South-Asian culture, identity, and the undeniable link between past and present in the effects of political turmoil and violence. Asghar employs varied forms in this collection featuring both lyrical free verse as well as more experimental forms. I was especially intrigued by the creative experimentation which I thought worked really well with the themes Asghar taps into.  In “Microaggression Bingo,” Asghar contrasts intense and complex notions of Western microaggressions with a simpler bingo card form, many of which ring true in terms of one’s ability to address such statements and actions. In “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan,” Asghar lays out her poem as a floor plan to portray being an orphan in the foster care system. I don’t think I’ve seen innovative forms like the ones Asghar makes use of. The collection is also a very informative one and builds on other intersectional struggles which share common themes and hardships. I often found myself having to pause to put the collection down and take in the work. It can be a quick read, but I held onto the collection for a couple of weeks to make sure I was able to grant each poem enough time and thought and to connect recurring threads anchoring the work, especially with more haunting and complex pieces.

—Mays Kuhail, Mid-American Review

What We’re Reading, with Assistant Editor Christopher McCormick

For my first summer read, I decided to pick up Leila Chatti’s new chapbook Figment (Bull City Press, 2022). At 35 pages it goes by quickly, yet its emotional depth and experimentation make every reread a rewarding experience. The chapbook’s black cover and barely visible, embossed title set up the work’s mystery and coyness early on. Composed of half formally restless lyrics and half terse, associative abecedarian poems, Figment indulges in the mysterious and uses language to confront difficult emotions.

While the poems are withholding about their specific subject, the theme of thwarted motherhood becomes gradually clear in poems like from the root *dheigh-: where the speaker writes: “fictile I formed / you I didn’t know before / I did it what I was / capable of.” As the book progresses, the exploration of language becomes a way to confront this trauma. In the abecedarian poems, this formal constraint takes the poems on a journey of association the speaker uses to gain understanding and acceptance. The rewards of this endeavor, for the reader and speaker alike, are reflections on grief and loss that could only be gleaned through experimentation with this form. For example, the speaker writes: “faint / face less / fabrication / false falter / fault,” ending with “failure familiar.” This phonetic practice illuminates for the reader just how nuanced and bewildering the experience of grief can be and how language may be used to organize its mess.

––Christopher McCormick, Mid-American Review

What We’re Reading, with MAR Blog Co-Editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

Maybe I‘ve been feeling a bit homesick, for lack of a better word, as of late. The semester ended and I’ve found myself with too much time on my hands. So, I picked up the copy of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (Vintage Classics, 1994) I had lying around in some unpacked boxes in my apartment and started reading. I always forget how much I love this novel by Cather who might arguably be Nebraska’s most famous author coming from the red grass fields she writes about in her novel, until I pick up the book again. I had the pleasure of visiting The National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, NE last June and got to see many of the places written about in the novel: the back door Jim runs from to go to the neighbor’s when his grandparents move into Black Hawk from the farmland outside of the town, mirroring from where Willa Cather once ran. Returning to this novel once again with a greater perspective of the influence of place and what Cather is giving us, is bringing more resonance to the work this countless read-through to truly feel the “…motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping….” (18). Cather’s novel is as close to this Nebraska as we can come to know; however, there’s still the same amount of sky blanketing a similar treeless prairie.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Mid-American Review