Arthur Rimbaud 
A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat (Second Edition) 

A reissue of Rimbaud’s highly influential work, with a new preface by Patti Smith and the original 1945 New Directions cover design by Alvin lustig.

New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s
A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat — a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from “the examination of his own depths.”



Rimbaud originally distributed
A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions’s edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and it quickly became a classic. Rimbaud’s famous poem “The Drunken Boat” was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as “the first punk” — a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry.



This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig–designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel — and now National Book Award–winner — Patti Smith.

About the author

Louise Varese was an American biographer and translator of French. She is known for her translations of Stendhal, Proust, Georges Simenon, Julien Gracq, St.-John Perse and Arthur Rimbaud.