"This book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go." ~ Jason Allen-Paisant, Winner of the TS Eliot Prize
Nick Makoha is one of the UK's most daring and celebrated poets. His debut collection, _Kingdom of Gravity,_ was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the _Guardian's _Best Books of the Year.
His poems have appeared in _The New York Times_, _the Poetry Review_, _Poetry Wales_, _Wasafiri,_ _Boston Review_, and _Callaloo_. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize.
He joins us for _The New Carthaginians_, an expansive new collection revealing a world in which time is out of joint...
_A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin's Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha's flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-'70s New York City, signing them SAMO (c). Three characters who are also one - the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat - journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.
_
_Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat's technique of the 'exploded' collage, our heroes' odyssey gathers the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life._
_'Hold that note,' writes the poet. 'In this place you are no longer the chorus... In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.'_
"A moving collection of entangled histories. Makoha's poems break, cut, scratch and sample with heightened language to remake and renew the boundaries of myth. Do not sleep on _The New Carthaginians_" ~ Raymond Antrobus