Rimbaud the Son

With a spellbound, ferocious humility in every way companionable to the soul of his subject, Michon writes an indispensable book. Joining Bonnefoy's Rimbaud and Miller's The Time of the Assassins, Rimbaud the Son accepts a great reading's most fateful election: "To be poetry in person." Surely, Michon has found Rimbaud in person, in his particular Heaven.--Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems

Michon is a brilliant miniaturist of biography, best known for his collection of novellas, Small Lives. In Arthur Rimbaud he has found a perfect sitter for this tintype portrait of the Billy the Kid of French poetry—the fastest draw (and earliest silence) in the history of modern verse.--Richard Sieburth

 

“Who better than Pierre Michon, brilliantly mixing biography and invention, to offer a striking portrait of Rimbaud the boy, Rimbaud the man, and Rimbaud the poet in fewer than one hundred dense and moving pages?”--Alyson Waters

With a spellbound, ferocious humility in every way companionable to the soul of his subject, Michon writes an indispensable book. Joining Bonnefoy's Rimbaud and Miller's The Time of the Assassins, Rimbaud the Son accepts a great reading's most fateful election: "To be poetry in person." Surely, Michon has found Rimbaud in person, in his particular Heaven.
--Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems
 

~Donald Revell

Michon is a brilliant miniaturist of biography, best known for his collection of novellas, Small Lives. In Arthur Rimbaud he has found a perfect sitter for this tintype portrait of the Billy the Kid of French poetry—the fastest draw (and earliest silence) in the history of modern verse.
–Richard Sieburth

~Richard Sieburth

“Who better than Pierre Michon, brilliantly mixing biography and invention, to offer a striking portrait of Rimbaud the boy, Rimbaud the man, and Rimbaud the poet in fewer than one hundred dense and moving pages?”
 –Alyson Waters

~Alyson Waters

“Readers who surrender to the strange whorls and swirls of this book will be lifted out of themselves and thrilled and sometimes richly, lastingly disoriented. This was precisely the reason why earlier generations of readers eagerly sought out the literature of other lands, exposing themselves to what the great Boston scholar George Ticknor used to refer to as “our other selves, whom we have not met.” If the Margellos World Republic of Letters seeks to revive that healthy old curiosity, they could scarcely have picked a better author for it than Michon—and more power to them.”—The Quarterly Conversation

~The Quarterly Conversation

“The French writer Pierre Michon has made a career of his obsession with biographical uncertainty. Renowned in France since his 1984 novel, Small Lives, he has now received a burst of ravishing English translations by way of Yale University Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series. Rimbaud the Son, translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, is his moody, dagger-slim anti-biography of one of the most mythologized writers of all time.”—Sam Sacks, New Yorker

~Sam Sacks, New Yorker