"Don't let the short lines fool you. This is a trap."
Just Keeping It Simple. is a fiercely raw, deceptively compact poetry collection that uses tight, traditional structures as a Trojan Horse for razor-sharp social commentary. Forcing his signature stream-of-consciousness delivery into shorter verse, Darren Hobson teases the literary establishment by taking the unglamorous friction points of ordinary British life—dripping taps, traffic jams, cold turnips, and burnt Yorkshire puddings—and exploding them into stark considerations of existential exhaustion and aging.
Do not expect polite, sanitized art.Beneath the surface of these forty-four short tracks lies a biting, cynical weapon against modern absurdity. Hobson balances aggressive, laugh-out-loud takedowns of internet trolls and lazy social media influencers with a deep, disarming vulnerability regarding factory work, social anxiety, and deep personal paranoia. Moving seamlessly from raw physical intimacy to sudden grief, these poems use tactile street-level imagery—damp trainers in the rain and the clank of old bed springs—to ground profound mental labyrinths in gritty reality.
Packed with self-deprecating ironies and meta-poetic interjections that break the fourth wall to comment on the text itself, Just Keeping It Simple. is an unfiltered, spoken-word survival guide. It is a masterclass in dark British humour from an independent voice that refuses to play by the rules.