BIO - BRENTLEY FRAZER

Brentley Frazer is a legendary protagonist, in the vein of Bukowski’s literary alter-ego . . . he uses that nervy present-perfect tense to take us further, faster, harder.

Jenny Valentish

Sydney Morning Herald

Brentley Frazer is an Australian poet whose work operates at the frontier between language, consciousness, and technology. His writing blends techno-surreal poetics, glitch-religious aesthetics, and narrative experimentation informed by formal linguistic constraints. Frazer’s writing archives the psychological ruins and ecstatic visions of the digital age, while searching for meaning within systems designed to extract it.

His ‘novelised’ memoir Scoundrel Days (University of Queensland Press, 2017) was the first full-length creative work in history written entirely in E-Prime — English without any form of the verb “to be” — completed as the creative component of his PhD research. The book garnered national media attention in Australia, establishing Frazer as a distinctive voice in contemporary literature.

He lives in Brisbane, Australia, dividing his time between writing, composing music, making visual art and raising two children.

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

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

“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.”

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Cushla Chauhan

Vogue

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.

The Reader NZ Elisabeth Morton