"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."--Quarterly Conversation

"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