Poetry by Al Brilliant

Published by betweenthehighway

2.25” x 28”

Thermal printing on receipt paper

2024

In deciding what to republish of Al Brilliant’s vast writings, I considered excerpts from his many journals, such as Bus Journal or Bookshop Journal, but I was continually drawn to the slim PAINTBRUSH pamphlet with the even slimmer poem “OIL.” If not only for its applicable formatting for receipt, then for how the poem encompassingly depicts a life through a single substance, oil, and how that life—the life of a publisher—takes on a mythic quality, subsisting on that lubricating, penetrating, birthing, and protecting substance. This republication includes the  biographical essay by alex benedict, “A Brilliant Life.” 

Al Brilliant is born by oil and births books with oil.

     They say that oil and water
            won’t mix
      but when I was born
      they put olive oil scented with balsam
      in the sea water of my mother’s womb
      they put ink there and pads of paper
      a hammer, a ruler
      a type case full of lead

Writer, bookmaker, and late editor of Unicorn Press, Al Brilliant was born in St. Louis, Missouri “a triple Gemini on May 22, 1936 in the midst of a severe American Depression.” In 1965, he and his wife Teo Savory began running Unicorn Press, publishing hundreds of poetry collections as well as translations from French and German. At 73 years old, Brilliant established the Glenwood Community Bookshop in Greensboro, North Carolina where he passed away in May of 2022.