Selected Poems 1988-2016 focuses on Alan Halsey's longer poems from the period and brings together the previously scattered sequences Ars Poetica, Tracks & Tracts of the Lizopard, A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts and Latin for Today: The Sequel. It includes some revised and expanded texts such as the John Dee libretto Loagaeth alongside poems written since Rampant Inertia, published by Shearsman in 2014.

"Halsey exhilaratingly explores language and ideology, running different jargons and discourses together in a poetry of passionate and stoical resistance." --Robert Potts, The Guardian

"He continues to create a kabbalah of cultural signs, a dictionary of linguistic possibilities, a stylish verbal music, in his essential role as courteous gadfly." --Paul Merchant, Chicago Review

"Halsey's poems come in such variety, from very straightforward, personal-voice addresses to the most recondite word salads - like a dense portable anthology from a rich and complex literary canon that simultaneously overlaps with but is fundamentally shifted from the recognizable 'canon'." --Mark Scroggins, Culture Industry