Books by Dustin Pearson

Pearson's debut introduced us to a master transmogrifier. In this surreal, follow-up collection he investigates the architectural implications of inheritance-how the human body houses the violence of its forebears. A Family Is a House is a blueprint, a guide to the logical structures and spaces we build in our minds: sometimes to keep our secrets in, sometimes to keep the horrors out. Pearson offers us an answer to the toughest question: what happens when our secrets are our horrors? We build, compartmentalize, and quarantine. We refract, reflect, demolish, and burn. This is a book about the oldest partition-that thin wall between the dark and the light. This is a book about bravery, about severing oneself from a lineage of abuse. When the hands that feed us also beat us, we must beat them back with the gifts we've been given. Through Pearson, we relearn that language can be weaponized into a kind of magic that saves us. - Brandon Rushton

In his debut collection Millennial Roost, poet Dustin Pearson interrogates the parameters of childhood abuse, drawing attention not only to the incessant ache of trauma, but to its daily reproduction, against which the language of growth is a restorative act. -Damian Caudill