If You Don't Get It Wrong You Might Not Get It Right is a neon-soaked tapestry of muscular and musical writings for when the shit hits the proverbial micro and macro fan. Hughes is a tangential writer, regularly complementing bawdy gallows humour with visceral verve. To him, the mind is a stung nettle, hearts stones skimming across lakes in the gloaming, time an arrow aimed at cloistered doves, and love a grain of sand on a crumbling shoulder. His vernacular prose vignettes and poems rummage around in the dirty chest of late-night bars riddled with acidic wit and tap room nuggets of ephemera and licentious banter. Drinkers dock like supertankers ordering cherry stone chariots of whiskey sours. Characters like Fadder, Mr. Death Stare, Panama Stan, and the Irish Boudicca emerge fleetingly out of the cracked dirty sink of life, then fade back into dreams and malfeasance. At the centre of this collection is a sequence of over a hundred Senryū, a Japanese three-lined poetic form. Acting as a foil to the lucky losers and vilified fools of the collection's other writings, they are more introspective distillations mischievously seasoned with both a quiet tenderness and prurient truculence.
