Slim Pickings is a gloriously rich and rum array of poems and vignettes largely drawn from the weird and wondrous delights of Oslo. The writing is a gritty and darkly humorous testament to the city’s subterranean underbelly. Wacky encounters interweave throughout the collection. Unsavouriness lurks around every street corner, and inside the bars, if you scratch the surface, there’s plenty of lurid prurience and puerility swilling about.

Hughes sees the world from the paradoxical standpoint of a romantic cynic. His visions flash and rumble with an equal measure of contemptuous tenderness and melancholic restlessness. He has a playful ear, which bristles with soaked-up vernacular, but he also possesses an inner quietude, ripe with vivacious and lush imagery that creates philosophical interventions in the poetic narrative.

Whether from the basement of the soul or the penthouse of the heart, Slim Pickings is a collection of candid and mischievously playful writing that will lower and elevate your imagination to the sublime and the ridiculous.