OIL / A Brilliant Life

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.