CLOSING BOX Kieran McGuigan

Closing Box first appeared in 2019 as a pamphlet in a small print run. Dark Branch Press now brings it out of the archive, set in Bodoni beneath an aubergine cover by Olivia Petrini.

Inside, Dante and Chaucer keep company with Hans Christian Andersen. A nightingale burns to ash through the turning of a sestina, and from the ash a phoenix flies. Palamon rages in his cell against the brother who betrayed him. Adam and Eve quarrel their way out of Eden in the idiom of a modern divorce, and Thumbelina herself is questioned, courted and finally cursed across two long prose poems. Between them come a psalm and a hymn, a parting remembered on the Mekong, and a psychedelic night recovered in fragments.

The ambition is Romantic with a modern nerve, moving from a sestina to street talk and from scripture to profanity, making no apology for either. Like a designer's first collection, the book already carries the signature of the house: classical in cut, dark in its tailoring, drawn as much to ornament as to wreckage.