The prose poems in The Underground Cabaret form the final volume of a quartet, following on from New York Hotel, Identity Papers and Makers of Empty Dreams. "In The Underground Cabaret, Ian Seed is at his unsettling and uncanny best. In each of these tightly constructed pieces, Seed gives us people who are helpless in the face of absurdity, who miss each other or form only transient connections and who suffer alienation and loneliness in eerie and surreal encounters which emerge out of the seemingly ordinary and mundane. 'Just when I thought I'd turned everything inside out,' says one character; just when we think Seed has turned the world upside down as far as it will go, he turns it further, holds it tighter." -Andrew McMillan "The real and the uncanny turn on a sixpence in The Underground Cabaret. If Raymond Carver and Jacques Tati had collaborated, it would be here. In bars, offices, bedrooms, cafes, trains, fields, and many other likely and unlikely places, Ian Seed pulls daily reality taut, twists it with expertise and distils it down to its finest surreality, navigating what it means to be human, everywhere, nowhere and at any given moment." -Jane Monson. 'Seed's micro-narratives and oblique parables are at once droll and haunting, as unpredictable as quicksand, and as elegant as the work of those masters of the prose poem, Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy.' -Mark Ford, on New York Hotel, in the Times Literary Supplement,

"Bitter Grass was written in 1976 while I was in my last year of high school in the city of Lushnje in Albania. It was refused by N. Frasheri, the government publication house in Tirana. According to the censor, 'the texts in this collection do not deal with the theme of our socialist village; the hero of the poems is a solitary person who flees from his contemporaries, from the Association of Pioneers, from reality; moreover, the transformations that socialism has brought to the countryside under the guidance of the Party are entirely absent...' At that time, the collection had the title Diary of the Wood. I translated the texts from Albanian into Italian in 1999. Two years later, in 2001, the work was published for the first time in Italy. This new publication has been expanded and includes new texts in respect to the first edition. Offering these poems to readers, it's as if I were going back many years to the icy and inhospitable winter of the Albanian dictatorship where I began my journey as a poet." -Gezim Hadari

`The delight of Ian Seed's brilliantly droll poems is that they are not entirely droll. They look and sound normal, like brief prose anecdotes told in a bar but the apparent normality is edged with disorientation, menace and anxiety. We slip over the edge in an instant and look to recover our balance but can't quite. The world has gone, leaving behind a comical void. And that, we understand, is the nature of the world. The voice is controlled, in fact it's perfect. It's just that nothing else is.' -George Szirtes

The prose poems in Identity Papers seek to construct a living bridge between the self and its shadow, between the self and other, and between present and past. They do so with a vulnerable faith, working with Heidegger's dictum that all things must be allowed their time in darkness. Along the way, their narrators meet a series of disturbing, irresistible strangers. Identity Papers follows on from Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014). It is the second volume in a trilogy of prose poem collections.

With a sparse, haunting, often playful lyricism, the makers of empty dreams emerge like figures in the reels of an old, almost abandoned film. Their stories, often set in different countries which we may or may not know, tell of loss and estrangement, of betrayal and reconciliation, and of a search for the possibilities of renewal along the way.

With a fragmented yet rich lyricism, 'Shifting Registers' crosses borders between lost and rediscovered identity. The voices in the poems may be tentative and vulnerable, regretful and haunting, or playful and provocative, as they relive and re-imagine half-remembered journeys and encounters. That which has become strange through its distance in the past becomes once again familiar, while that which is near in the present begins to be unknowable. Shifting Registers seeks to reconcile the two, and to construct a wholeness for the future, yet without resort to easy answers or false resolution. Throughout, there is delight in the navigation of different realities and new spaces through language.

The poems and prose poems in Anonymous Intruder navigate the vulnerabilities revealed in relationships, only to abandon these in a wandering search for new encounters and new truths. The seeking 'self' goes into exile to be shattered and reconstructed. In a hesitant movement towards the transcendental, the poems consider the possibility and impossibility of returning home. They must first find a way to recognise the stranger approaching from a distance. Although these narratives are fragmented and elliptical, the imagery is stark and clear, the language concise, the rhythms and patterns engaging.