Inescapable Insatiable Shit Happens All the Time is a collection of poetry with prose interludes by a writer inspired by poets like John Cooper Clarke, Charles Bukowski, and Gil Scott-Heron.
Hughes transgresses boundaries and bastardizes attitudes, combining the guttural and humorous colloquial voices of present-day streets and bars into a knot of parallels and paradoxes. In prose narratives like Guide to the Hamartons, two friends, John Joe B. Albino and Pavo la Terriblé, meet an alcoholic Cumbrian as they flâneur around the small town. In poems like Mr. Hyper, The Coal Man, and Hermes, for example, he embodies the subjects and presents personae in the way that Fernando Pessoa developed his numerous pseudonyms. This approach creates poetic elements layered with honest introversion and pugnacity in the face of defeat. The reader is shown rituals of seeing, much the same as John Berger intimated in his 1970s book Ways of Seeing. For Hughes, a leaf has ‘clouds for pillows’, poetry is the ‘wind passing through fences’, and time is ‘calm as a cathedral’s echoes’. The writing flows then pinballs at tangents and complications ripe with scorn, fortitude, sassiness, and candour. Often, an enigmatic sting is in the telling, and although each endgame may resolve, ‘one hip bar’s like another’s destiny’s near or far’, and there is a pervading sense that you might as well be hung for a lamb as a sheep.