Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor today is Phillip B. Williams.
Dustin Pearson
I dreamt I was showing my brother around in Hell.
We started inside the house.
Everything was brown besides the white sheets
in the bedrooms. I let him look
outside the window, told him it was hottest there,
where the flames rolled against the glass,
as if a giant mouth were blowing them,
as if there were thousands caught in the storm,
pushing it onward with mindless running,
save a desperation for something else.
How had there been a house in Hell
and we invited with time to spend? Why was it
I hadn't questioned how I got there? My brother
growing so tired from the heat, the sweating?
Surely we could open the door, he said. Surely there'll be
a breeze. Even seeing already, even burning himself
on the doorknob. His eyes turned back in his head
working his way to the bedrooms, staining
the sheets with his blistered hands, and though I knew the beds
weren't for the rest of any body, I sat by and let him sleep.
from the book A SEASON IN HELL WITH RIMBAUD / BOA Editions, LLC
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Formerly, the poem was “A Season in Hell.” A mentor suggested I add “with Rimbaud,” which elevated the brother in my mind beyond the realm of stock. There were a couple of years between then and deciding to make the poem the start of what became "A Season in Hell with Rimbaud." It seemed daunting to think about the two brothers beyond that scene given how grand the story was already implied to be, but here we are. I’m grateful.  

Dustin Pearson on "A Season in Hell with Rimbaud"
Bright blue cover of Vivek Narayanan's revisioning of the Ramayana, "After"
Tishani Doshi on a Fresh Vision of the Ramayana

"The poems in Vivek Narayanan’s After, however, are masterfully aware in terms of tone and the ‘time-spirit’ (‘Some Omens’)—leaning into the wonderful slipperiness of epic time, while being fully cognisant of these current fractious times....The result is a collection of leaping, fierce poems that move in several directions, leaving the reader besieged and dazzled in equal measure."

via THE POETRY SOCIETY
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What Sparks Poetry:
Rob Schlegel on Michele Glazer's fretwork

"In an explanation of the process the multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman uses in his Anthropocene Series (featured on the cover of fretwork) Glazer writes, 'The artist sets a process in motion, but the materials have the last word.' It's a deeply instructive metaphor for how Glazer allies with language to create poems that feel and sound as though she is tapping into a frequency just beyond herself."
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