Songs Gone Wrong

Songs Gone Wrong (2026)
Mission Creep Press

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, and nearly every one of them is written to be read aloud, at a festival, in a pub, or wherever the nearest willing (or unwilling) audience can be found.

Rhys Hughes is a Welsh writer known for work that sits between speculative fiction and literary experimentation, celebrated for its imaginative scope, wordplay and sense of the absurd. Songs Gone Wrong is his third book from Mission Creep Press, a poetry collection for anyone who has ever mangled a lyric and wondered if the mangled version was better

Streetlamp Astrology

Streetlamp Astrology (2026)

Hybrid Sequence Media

Poems and Prose Poems.

“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

He Felt a Ghost, So He Stole It

He Felt a Ghost, So He Stole It (2026)

Mission Creep Press

Prose poems, thought experiments, fictive meditations and crypto verse.

"A panda arrives at your door for tea at six in the morning. A burglar steals a ghost and has no idea what to do with it. A madman marries a cumulonimbus cloud with a dowry measured in millibars. Two astronauts drift apart in the void, exchanging insults scratched on a panel.

He Felt a Ghost, so He Stole It is Rhys Hughes at his most concentrated, a book of prose poetry that dissolves the boundaries between flash fiction and rhythmic lyrics, between the philosophical riddle and the shaggy-dog joke, between Borgesian perception and Kafkaesque bafflement.

Arranged in three linked sequences, these pieces treat images as infinitely compressible forms, logic as a plaything, and language as something to be enjoyed at speed. They are wry, strange, formally precise, and quietly unsettling. They ask what geometry looks like when the angles go wrong, what a week tastes like when someone tries to turn it into a book, and whether innocence is possible in a boundless void with nothing to stand on.

Perfect for readers of flash fiction, experimental poetry, absurdist literature, and anyone who has ever felt a ghost and wondered whether to keep it..."

Contents:

The Geometry of Maybe * Sorry About Reality * The Pangram's Progress

Imaginary Hotheads

Imaginary Hotheads (2026)
Black Scat Books

"Welsh writer Rhys Hughes performs his magic in this masterful work of experimental fiction.

Imaginary Hotheads is an intricately constructed fiction divided into three sections. Each section is a frame around a selection of smaller fictions.

These short 'flash fantastika' are mystically linked — often connected by mood, theme or style. Imaginary Hotheads exhibits the author’s signature absurdism, wordplay and whimsy, laced with hard-edged, speculative epiphanies."

Contents:

The Moving Finger * Hannah and her Cisterns * The Fortnight Fistfight

The Unfair Dinkum

The Unfair Dinkum (2026)

Incunabula Media

"Welcome to The Living Library, also known as the Flesh and Blood Lending Facility. Here people do not check out books, but actual writers. You check them out, take them home for a few weeks, and then bring them back. If the writer is dead, you check out a sack of his remains.

Sounds reasonable, the sort of place anyone would want to work. And our narrator is fairly happy, until one day his routine is disrupted by Joey Rue, an Australian writer who has the impertinence to check himself out of the library and precipitate an adventure which takes him, and our narrator, across vast tracts of perilous land in search of the ‘Unfair Dinkum’.

And what is that?

You need to read the book to find out, cobber."

With an Introduction by Brian Evenson.

Trumpet Strudel Mineshafts

Trumpet Strudel Mineshafts (2026)
Gibbon Moon Books

Eighteen one-act plays featuring castaways, cowboys, duellists, pandas, pilots, twiddlers, cyclists, phantoms, eccentric academics, angry bears, jazz musicians, mystic gorillas, philosophers, hippies, madmen, and many more strange characters. Written for people and puppets, for dreamers and schemers, and intended for the page as well as the stage.

“If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes’ style, with all that means, is among the most beautiful I’ve encountered in several years.” — SAMUEL R. DELANY

“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.” — JEFF VANDERMEER

Contents:

The Universal Set * Dr Oxygen and Mr Hydrogen * The Modesty Men * The Wallah * The Dessert Isle * Like a Rhino Cowboy * Balconies * Pandemonium * The Plane Play * Twiddling * Uneasy Rider * Three Friends * The Pendulum * Pursued by a Bear * The Jazz Strumpet * The Mystic Gorilla * The End of the Road * The Grass