He Felt a Ghost, So He Stole It

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, The Geometry of Maybe, Sorry About Reality and The Pangram's Progress, 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.

Praised by Michael Moorcock as "almost the sum of our planet's literature" and by Samuel Delany for a style "among the most beautiful I've encountered," Hughes is a Welsh writer championed for fantastical fictions that are both intellectual and hilarious, influenced by Borges, Calvino, Barthelme, Boris Vian, and Stanislaw Lem.

This is his first collection devoted entirely to prose poetry, and the first book from Mission Creep Press. Perfect for readers of flash fiction, experimental poetry, absurdist literature, and anyone who has ever felt a ghost and wondered whether to keep it...