Chapbooks include:

Scattering My Mother's Ashes (Red Ceilings, Press 2024)

In Scattering My Mother’s Ashes, I am attempting to navigate the mixed and complicated emotions of bereavement. I have only partially succeeded, but I think of the poems here as perhaps a beginning of some kind. The first sequence, ‘My Mother’, is a litany after the manner of Eduardo Moga’s Mi padre. It brings together a series of splintered memories in the hope of creating an unsettling, bittersweet elegy. In the second sequence, grief takes the shape of a series of tiny fictions, in which loss and sadness become indistinguishable from the comic and absurd. I am hoping these poem-stories will take readers into a world in which they won’t know if they want to laugh or cry, or both at the same time. As James Tate famously said in an interview with Charles Simic for Paris Review, ‘I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best’. Or, as Laurence Sterne put it: ‘Either laugh with me, or at me, or, in short, do anything,—only keep your temper'.

(This pamphlet sold out very quickly on the publisher website, but I still have a few author copies left if you're interested.)

I Remember (Red Ceilings, Press 2021)

‘In this new work Ian Seed exploits a repetitive device (I remember) to signal moments in his life. The repetition becomes an affecting underscore of his need to recall, record and memorialise. Unadorned with explanation, the poet’s inner and outer trajectories evoke people, places and eras with simple beauty and poignancy. Insistent and urgent, these cameos resonate and linger, voicing experience with courage and clarity.’ Lucy Hamilton

Fidelities (LikeThisPress 2015)

'I love Ian Seed's poetry. His strange dreamy 'narratives' which are also non-narrative have a vague yet crystal hard precision which is not easy to encapsulate or describe... This is clever writing, playful and ever open to possibility but it's also the genuine article.' Steve Spence, Stride.

'This collection enacts an excursive articulation of the world and language, the shifts and creative repetitions found in both, between words and inside words, between moments and within moments: each poem finding its distinct poetic imperative to reveal these moves in the landscape in complex and subtle ways.' Patricia Farrell.

Threadbare Fables (LikeThisPress 2012)

'First things first—don’t waste time trying to decide whether Ian Seed’s mysterious, pared-down narratives are prose poems or flash fiction or some other form you’ve not heard of yet. For that matter, don’t worry about whether or not they’re strictly fables, either. There are no neat moral lessons to be learned. They are fabulous, though, in every sense of the word.' Matt Merritt, Sphinx.

'Not exactly funny, but I smiled when I read it, nevertheless.' Martin Stannard, Stride Magazine.

'They extend the force of Jacob's Le Cornet à dés beautifully into today's urban sphere.' John Ashbery, in email to author.

A Man of Some Influence (Moss & Flint Publications, 1987)

'Powerful and haunting work.' Dave Cunliffe, Global Tapestry.