Alise Blayney

Alise Blayney completed a Creative Writing degree at the University of Wollongong in 2007. After taking a long hiatus from writing to recover from the trauma of her partner Benjamin Frater’s death in 2007, she is finally back in the saddle with the publication of her chapbook, Grief for Hire.

Alise is intrigued by the relationship between mental and emotional distress, and creativity. What trips her trigger is how word weaponry has the power to transmogrify reality, transcend trauma, dispel distress and make meaning of adverse experience.

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The urgent rhythms of spoken word pound through these poems and jump off the page. The poems themselves are by turns frank, cryptic, psychedelic, chilling, funny and sexy as hell. The long final poem is a howling, circling, echoing odyssey through — and tribute to — a grief survived. — Tricia Dearborn

If these poems deal with violence, madness, grief and death they stare down such terrors with both a form and language that are nothing less than high velocity life-affirming, the end result being continuously memorable. — Alan Wearne

Poetry of love lived and fear uninhibited, remaking language and breaking the past present. Experimental, elegiac, extraordinary work no prescription can fill. — David Stavanger

Alise has worked across many facets in varied roles for both public and non-government mental health services as a Peer Support Worker since 2013, and is currently a Senior Educator and Peer Learning Advisor at the South Eastern Sydney Recovery & Wellbeing College. She is proud to be a part of the Mental Health Consumer, Psychiatric Survivor & Mad Pride Movements.

Alise has been a Co-Editor with Tim Heffernan for The Clozapine Clinic at online creative arts journal Verity La since 2016. Clozapine Clinic is a creative writing project inspired by the late Benjamin Frater that aims to support writers with mental health issues who are wanting to HOWL. She is thrilled to have recently come on board as Co-Managing Editor with Michele Seminara at Verity La.