Alex Mazey won the Judge’s Prize in the Magma Poetry Competition in 2025, a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019, and the Roy Fisher Prize from Keele University in 2018. A contributing researcher on sociology and postmodern theory for the international academic journal Baudrillard Now, he is also the author of Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021) and Living in Disneyland (2020). His debut poetry collection, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition, was published in 2024 by the award-winning Bad Betty Press.
Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.
“In Alex Mazey’s singular fusion of visual and Cute poetics, join Ghost as they pass through the liminal spaces of empty car parks, hotel corridors and lighthouses – searching for, but never quite finding, connection. Part poetry collection, part minimalist comic, in which our reality shifts from the political to the virtual, from FBI raids to survival horror-style locales – in which we are both the possessor and the possessed. Ghost reassures us that it’s heartbreaking to be human, and society is set up to fuel that loneliness. But, there is light within the gloom of capitalism’s ennui. Most notably the glow of vending machines at night – or is that the afterlife?” — Matthew Haigh
Sad Boy Aesthetics is available through the award-winning Broken Sleep Books. (Please consider purchasing through independent bookstores before visiting Amazon.) Sad Boy Aesthetics is only £8.99 – and whilst the publisher received a Michael Marks Publishing Award, Broken Sleep has conducted some incredible work outside of publishing too, whether that’s raising almost £10k for a variety of causes, or covering the citizenship costs of a European migrant to the UK. For what is essentially the price of two coffees, you’ll get 150-pages of Mark Fisher/Jean Baudrillard vibes – not forgetting a beautiful foreword written by MIT/Strange Attractor Press’ cultural theorist, Ken Hollings. Purchasing a copy of Sad Boy Aesthetics *is* the fabled praxis, allowing for Broken Sleep Books to continue its work as ‘An innovative, exciting, and vital press in the dreamscape of UK publishing.’
‘Sad Boy Aesthetics shares with its reader the casual nihilism of a party that never wants to be over, even though it really should have ended a long time ago. Nausea and vertigo become new forms of ecstasy. The glossy surfaces of this world are alive with distorting scratches and reflections. There is in Mazey’s exploration of this hedonistic despair an equally desperate desire for it not to stop.’ – Ken Hollings
‘Living in Disneyland’ is a short - yet urgent - tour de force exploration of late-stage capitalism, told through the lens of a Baudrillardian perspective. Through an aphoristic and epigrammatic style, Alex Mazey delves into the absurd (hyper)realities of contemporary living, attempting to decipher and understand 'what it means to observe surrealism in the 21st Century, to feel as if you must be dreaming.'
Purchase copies direct from Broken Sleep Books
