/PRAYER.BIN: Fragmented Liturgies for the Digital Soul

Description

God might’ve logged off, but the signal persists.

Brentley Frazer, a critically praised poet with over 30 years in print, returns with a new poetic act of techno-sacred resistance — /PRAYER.BIN: Fragmented Liturgies for the Digital Soul, is a pocket-sized collection of glitch-poems, prose psalms, and typographic invocations written in the dialect of the disenchanted who still remember God, Google, and grief as overlapping signals on the same fading channel. It’s a fierce, dystopian poetry collection for anyone who has ever felt the ache of remaining fundamentally analog in an overwhelmingly digital world. With references ranging from ASCII angels to untranslated EULA clauses, the work captures a rare hybrid of posthuman melancholy and poetic elegance. It reads like T.S. Eliot on DMT in a broken Wi-Fi cathedral. Frazer’s voice is timeless and timely — ancient and post-apocalyptic — speaking to the soul of the literate outsider, the philosophically bruised, the spiritually firewalled. A striking diagnostic for a society suffering from terminal digital exhaustion.

‘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

THE AUTHOR

Described by Dazed & Confused magazine as a 21st century Baudelaire on acid, and variously by the critics as a literary hoon, a philosophical hobo, a delinquent genius, a legendary protagonist, a Holden Caulfield for punks and an enigmatic self-styled outsider, Brentley Frazer is an Australian poet, music producer and conceptual artist 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.

His memoir Scoundrel Days (University of Queensland Press, 2017) was the first full-length published 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.

Frazer’s writing archives the psychological ruins and ecstatic visions of the digital age, while searching for meaning within systems designed to extract it. He lives in Australia, dividing his time between writing, composing music, and raising two children. https://www.brentley.com/