My new poetry book has been published. It will be one of my last ever poetry books. After this one, there will be my monumental Unrequited Self-Love in several large volumes, but I don't anticipate many others, if any.
SONGS GONE WRONG is the third Mission Creep Press book. I put it together in order to have a collection of poems that I feel comfortable reading aloud in public. So now at poetry readings and festivals, I don't need to mess around with scraps of paper or juggle my way between several volumes. Everything I need is contained in one volume. And yesterday I read from it for the first time, as part of the UNESCO City of Literature celebrations in Aberystwyth.
The official description of the book is as follows:
"Songs Gone Wrong is Rhys Hughes's gleefully unhinged collection of comic verse, built from the wreckage of songs half-remembered, misheard, and gloriously misappropriated. Music Hall collides with Nietzsche. Chris de Burgh is damned to a very specific corner of the afterlife. Robert Frost's snowy woods get a talking snowman. Along the way there are philosophical nipples, seafaring skeletons, tropical islands of questionable geography, invading Vikings, and more gorillas than any collection has a right to contain. Ranging from poems written in the 1990s to verse composed in the past few weeks, these pieces are less concerned with conventional wit than with absurdly offbeat delight."
The ebook edition is currently FREE on Amazon, but you'll have to hurry if you want to download it, as the offer ends on July 27th, which is tomorrow.
My new poetry book is now available from
Hybrid Sequence Media.
“Rhys Hughes’ latest poetry collection, Streetlamp Astrology, is a wonderful assemblage of Surrealist-influenced and daily vignettes, that evoke reality through a sharp yet often tender lens. Always surprising, Hughes’s poetry is tribute to both reality and poetry itself, as the ultimate telescope set on our bizarre and yet unique planet. A must read for lovers of the uncanny and the wonderful.” — Seb Doubinsky
“It has been a pleasure to venture into these word adventures, into these shadows, reflections and lobsters.” — John Hegley
“These poems are philosophy with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Streetlamp Astrology predicts a time when obscurity and melancholia are no longer synonymous with cleverness and depth. ” — Maithreyi Hughes
“These carefully-crafted poems and short essays look deeply, steadily, and closely at human relationships, literature, geography, philosophy, mythology, and the natural world. Unpredictable in content and form and intriguingly off-kilter, Hughes’ writing pulls us from the night sky to Skopje to Sri Lanka to the ocean floor and more. Keep your own eyes wide, trust Hughes as your guide, and enjoy the trip." — Jessie Janeshek
"These are poems that can turn streetlamps into stars or fuse the moon and a marriage. For all their casual charm, there’s some serious alchemy going on." — Matthew Francis
"Collectively, poets have always routinely dealt with the moon to the point of overkill. It's a sign of Rhys Hughes's confidence that, in his new collection,
Streetlamp Astrology, after a few deftly concise shorter poems, he gives us 'Sensible Ode to an Absurd Moon', a longer poem that knows it's taking on an eternal staple, yet runs all manner of fresh routines that grant lustre to the moon as is due, but also make it seem a hapless character watching strange things unspool from the sidelines. It's a delightful tour-de-force delivered with winning lightness. Laundrettes, flies, Belgrade, rabbit's shadows, Boy Kings follow, proving he can start with almost anything and end up at a wonderful somwhere else. Delight is a very underrated quality in contemporary poetry. Hughes has it in spades. Yet he can have a barney with Neruda or sustain a serious gaze that doesn't hide from lyric grace: 'The city twinkles / waves of heated air wash the stones / and secret bones propel their owners around the corners / into encounters with the radiance'. Go on, take a tuk tuk to the heart of this book." — Matthew Caley
My first published novel, out of print for more than twenty years, has just been republished by Mission Creep Press.
THE PERCOLATED STARS is a decadent adventure with cosmic overtones. Although it was originally published by a very small press who did no promo for it at all, somehow people still talk about this book. I have often been told it's my best novel.
"An astro-caffeine romp and perverted metaphysical fantasy set on the planets of a miniature solar system in the center of the hollow Earth. When a comet cracks open our world and allows these planets to spill out into the greater cosmos, only one man can exploit the catastrophe fully, the demented astronomer and coffee merchant Batavus Droogstoppel... but Batavus is now two men, a circumstance that constantly continues to complicate the chaos..."
To mark the occasion of its republication,
the ebook edition is FREE until July 12th.
The novel is rather more gothic and transgressive than the kind of fiction I write these days. If you like Lautréamont and Baudelaire for the darkness, but also Jules Verne and Ray Cummings for the gusto, you might also like this book. I think that Philip José Farmer probably comes closest to blending the genres most effectively. The Percolated Stars was most definitely influenced by Philip José Farmer.
This is the second book to be issued by Mission Creep Press. More will follow very soon.
Because
The Percolated Stars is partly set in outer space, which is an unusual location in my fiction, I have decided to make another of my books, also set in outer space, free for a free days, as a companionable act. Therefore
ROBOTS IN LOVE is
a FREE ebook until July 12th.
