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