Happy publication day to Brillo (now available from Lavender Ink). Endless gratitude to Sean F. Munro and Bill Lavender for manufacturing and distributing this holy box of flesh and bones. Grateful thanks also goes to the following brilliant poets for their generous responses to Brillo:

Paul Cunningham threshes the rim between Warhol’s shallow surface and Paul Thek’s “viscous interiority.” The brand-names (Thek, Warhol, Brillo) are re-pressed, re-touched, and un-boxed as art history unfolds through the gaze of a “worm-like eye. […] Cunningham decrypts the cubes, only to uncover a “flesh of code” and a “cryptography of open pores” that cannot be wormed through. The cubes align in a cabinet of curiosities that becomes Cunningham’s own memento mori. Will the void made flesh become spirit? Or will we all rot away in self-consumption…
— Felix Bernstein, author of Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry

Paul Cunningham’s Brillo is not unlike the living presence of what is sourced by concrete poetry. Its living energy and visual identity traces back to Apollinare’s Calligrammes and the Brazilian heritage that stems from the modern Manifesto sired by Augusto de Campos.
— Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light

Echoing Jesus—“Eat, this is my body”—the book offers itself as object and offering. In the spirit of Sontag’s Camp—“its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”—Brillo becomes its own spectacle. “The box is blank but branded. Like me.” Beautiful, brutal, and impossible to look away from, it performs its own undoing.
— Valerie Mejer Caso, author of Rain of the Future

Less an ekphrastic exercise than ecstatic experience, Brillo is the transgressive account of one Paul possessing another, as a demon is said to possess a human body. This poem is a panoptical shadowbox, a butcher’s “artifact of / devotion,” in which Cunningham shadowboxes Thek, who’d visited the Palermo catacombs before wadding War-hole’s carton with viscera. Each page is a screen-printed poster
— Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun

Now available!