…one of Australia’s most important Generation X poets ~ Nigel Krauth

/PRAYER.BIN: Fragmented Liturgies for the Digital Soul

Reviews [/prayer.bin]

Reading /PRAYER.BIN is like holding a cracked iPhone in one hand, rosary beads in the other & genuflecting at the altar of the algorithm while doom scrolling through your life & wondering how the fuck we got here. These poems are prayers to the patron saint of the desperate & disaffected; they are links to reset passwords that promise to reload the expired pages of your heart; they are push notifications of the eternally shattered psalm & incantations made of sorrow & love that may just taste like copper. Readers, in a world where LLMs have taken over & the last of your uninstalled belief is still buffering on the screen of your despair, thank God (& Brentley Frazer) for the heaven & hell-yeah of these beatific poems — in all their fractured & devastating glory. This. Is. Art.’  —Ali Whitelock

‘I love this book. There are few writers who are as unquestionably cool as Brentley Frazer.’ —Robbie Coburn

‘Brentley Frazer’s new collection. /PRAYER.BIN: Fragmented Liturgies for the Digital Soul upgrades his status as the uncompromising and unflinching poet-neuromancer of contemporary Australian letters. A dot-matrix T.S. Eliot, subverting Big tech’s colonising language to network our religious worship of the digital age, Frazer transmutes our dependence on technology that simultaneously frees our creative soul but also ransoms it, reassembling us from dial-up natives into cyberpunk slaves. This is poetry soldered to the page, hard-wired into our consciousness like existential time codes ticking — “our humanity compressed to pixels_ our definitions limited by character counts.” Like Tron — he fights for the users.’ —B. R. Dionysius


"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
… 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 moments of self-awareness. This enigmatic, self-styled outsider bravely lets us into the inner sanctum, which makes for a fascinating read.
Australian Book Review

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Verity Lane Pess 2026
Scoundrel Days by Brentley Frazer Australian Author UQP 2017
University of Queensland Press 2017
Aboriginal to Nowhere new poems by Brentley Frazer Australian Author HeadworX 2016
HeadWorX Press NZ 2016

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