BIO – Brentley Frazer

🜂 Brentley Frazer is an Australian conceptual artist, poet, and music producer operating at the frontier of language, consciousness, and technology. Described as a “21st-century Baudelaire on acid,” Frazer gained national acclaim for his memoir Scoundrel Days (UQP), the first full-length work in history written entirely in E-Prime (English without the verb “to be”). His multidisciplinary practice blends techno-surrealist poetics with glitch-religious aesthetics, archiving the psychological ruins of the digital age through post-digital poetry and lo-fi neoclassical trip-hop.

He lives in Australia, dividing his time between writing, composing music, and raising two children.
___
Genre: Lyrical Post-Digital Poetry / Lo-Fi Neoclassical Trip-Hop
Themes: Digital mysticism, techno-spirituality, glitch aesthetics, modern alienation, sacred irreverence
Compared to: Burial, Tricky, Charles Baudelaire, Ian Curtis, T.S. Eliot, Richard Brautigan, early Massive Attack, Black Mirror

He was publisher and editor of Retort Magazine ISSN 1445-7164 (2001-2013) and Bareknuckle Poet Journal of Letters (2013-2020). He was co-founder of The Vision Area (1998-2000) and a founding member of the Brisbane spoken word event Speed Poets (2003-2017). In 2012 he completed a MA at James Cook University under the supervision of creative non-fiction author Lindsay Simpson (Brothers in Arms, Daniel’s Story). In 2017 he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from Griffith University under the supervision of Nigel Krauth and the poet Anthony Lawrence.

Brentley Frazer’s language is electric, ornate, oddly formed and brilliant, poignant, sometimes surreal images and passages abound. The longer poems have a mixture of sharp, even dazzling writing. The vocabulary is massive, events and situations are charged, and the voice of the poet compelling. These collected meditations rip apart what we image to be ‘order’ . . . Frazer performs his trademark linguistic magic, penetrating everything from personal trauma to world order. In his hand, little is left unnoticed or forgotten by the poet, who has about him both the dreamer and the theorist, whose keen eye infiltrates everything it sees.

Takahē Magazine

New Zealand

"Described by Dazed & Confused as a 21st Century Baudelaire on acid, Brentley's unconventionality, radicalism, aggression, schizophrenia, non-adaptability and sublimity with hallucinogenic scenes and pornographic moments, a bizarre mix of elements of neo-symbolism and post-romanticism wrapped in a form of hyper-text prose, finds itself somewhere at the intersection of Burroughs, Breton, Rimbaud, Salinger and Ian Curtis."

Tribuna Magazine est. 1951

Item #1

“Poet and author Brentley Frazer recounts his rebellious youth with searing honesty in his memoir Scoundrel Days. Gritty with a lyrical cadence, the characters and violent, drug-fuelled, sexually-charged experiences he recounts are compelling for their raw detail and darkness. Frazer’s innate attraction to dissent, his untamed spirit and how it shaped his young life will sometimes shock, but makes reading his words an addiction in itself.” —Cushla Chauhan, Vogue

Cushla Chauhan

Vogue

Item #2

Jenny Valentish

Sydney Morning Herald

Item #3

Item #4

“Scoundrel Days pays homage to lost boys who grow up to be troubled young men. Frazer ramps up the speed, scattering memories like used tissues… Frazer is a legendary protagonist, in the vein of Bukowski’s literary alter-ego … His writing is sometimes compared to that of Andrew McGahan, in particular McGahan’s coming-of-age novel Praise, but Scoundrel Days spends little time examining the consistency of its author’s bodily fluids. Instead, he uses that nervy present-perfect tense to take us further, faster, harder. It has more in common with the hyperbolic, ugly-beautiful prose of Kathy Acker.” —Jenny Valentish, Sydney Morning Herald

Brentley Frazer’s memoir, Scoundrel Days, provides us with that rarest of literary treats: a good dose of the shocking … an immersive, vital prose that almost drags the reader along. This is not your ordinary memoir. Think of it more as an autobiographical novel or creative nonfiction … Frazer is writing here in the tradition of Helen Garner, Andrew McGahan and Nick Earls. This is dirty realism at its dirtiest. If, like I do, you remember the 80s and 90s as times of bohemian excess, you’ll find a lot to enjoy in Frazer’s terrific book. The Australian

… a visceral and urgent internal perspective which is both direct and poetic, often charming, and sometimes bleakly funny . . . Under it all lies a dark, nihilist void where, like Gordon in Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992), expectation is seen as the root of unhappiness. But unlike Gordon, who slouches towards destruction content in the acceptance of a flawed physicality, Frazer oscillates between bravado and mo- ments of self-awareness. This enigmatic, self-styled outsider bravely lets us into the inner sanctum, which makes for a fascinating read. Australian Book Review

Frazer’s latest collection of poems, Aboriginal to Nowhere is a love-letter to a world that ultimately rejects its people. It is a celebration of grunge, and a roll call of those things that are lame, cast-off, defunct and unlovable. It is about people divorced from the places they inhabit, and people who are disorientated in their own homes . . . Frazer’s poems find beauty in the brokenness of things. Like Kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing fractured pottery with gold, Frazer conjures rich images from the ‘buckets of colonial rubbish’. Frazer is a visionary at a time when humanity risks losing touch with its core animality, and the real-world places in which it finds itself. Elizabeth Morton