Overview

An expansive new collection from one of the UK's most daring and celebrated poets In The New Carthaginians, time - and with it the world - is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that leads to Uganda becoming a pariah state and later to the young Makoha's escape from the country. 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, Makoha's triumvirate of characters - the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat - embark on a heroes' odyssey, gathering 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.'

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9781802067071

Table of Contents

Reviews

A dizzying experience... like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat -- Philip Terry * Guardian * An invigorating collection that summons Basquiat, Icarus and a cast of characters from literary and pop culture -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times * Blurs the boundaries between listener and witness... The New Carthaginians is a collection steeped in Black music and culture, wrapped up with images of masculinity, Western philosophy and mythology. Makoha's poetics will richly reward readers who want to deeply engage with words and symbols... every word and every sign matters and is rigorously connected to that which is before, is now, and is yet to come -- Esther Kondo Heller * The Poetry Review * It's easy to focus on Makoha's formal ingenuity... far harder to map the astonishing horizons these tools enable... The book's preoccupaitons with flight, Icarus, and stargazing are only the surface artefacts of a visceral, unrelenting, internal odyssey -- Dave Coates * Poetry Book Society * I found a wealth of history, culture, thinking and art in this book... there is humour and sensuality in these poems too, as well as romance, real or sometimes imaginary.. Makoha switches with ease between the lyrical, factual and conversational; his language is absolutely stunning... I am grateful to a poet with such range and ambition, who refuses to settle for anything less than a whole, interrelated picture -- Maria Jastrzebska * Writer's Mosaic * Makoha conveys a different way of seeing and experiencing, part collision course, part fever dream, often removing the parameters of a conventional narrative or field of study, so that academic registers, mathematical concepts, musical notation, and the speaker’s tangential thoughts and metaphors rush into the field of the poem, hijacking the reader’s continuous experience of the text… Makoha’s experiments with form and his use of interruption and redirection challenge the borders of the poem, and at its best provide the blueprint for a burgeoning disruptive aesthetic that at times recklessly – and thrillingly – flies too close to the sun -- Zakia Carpenter-Hall * Jhalak Review * Extraordinary... Makoha is a bracing, challenging, agile poet – his writing is reminiscent of Aime Cesaire, in its powerful symbolism, but touched with the surreal edge of Nathaniel Mackey, the exhilarating shooting-for-the stars invention of Will Alexander... Makoha creates space for imagination and interpretation throughout, and in doing so he opens up the possibility of the disruption of the continuity of history – for something else to be imagined into being -- Nick Moss * Culture Matters * With extraordinary originality, Nick Makoha leaps in this book to the ambiguity of a codex to deconstruct it, and then reassembles it through neo-myths, language, history, philosophy, and collage … I will be surprised if this book doesn’t win many awards -- Yogesh Patel * World Literature Today * 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 One of our most daring and original poets, Nick Makoha has channelled the wild energies of Basquiat’s art into this essential new collection. These are poems layered with potent coordinates from African and world history, alongside the sensations of a Black Icarus in headlong flight, to create a new mythology all their own. Churning with codes, enigmas, unforgettable images, this is poetry that resonates with an emotive power that lies beyond immediate comprehension -- Sarah Howe * T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet of Loop of Jade *

A dizzying experience... like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat -- Philip Terry * Guardian * It's easy to focus on Makoha's formal ingenuity... far harder to map the astonishing horizons these tools enable... The book's preoccupaitons with flight, Icarus, and stargazing are only the surface artefacts of a visceral, unrelenting, internal odyssey -- Dave Coates * Poetry Book Society * Makoha conveys a different way of seeing and experiencing, part collision course, part fever dream, often removing the parameters of a conventional narrative or field of study, so that academic registers, mathematical concepts, musical notation, and the speaker’s tangential thoughts and metaphors rush into the field of the poem, hijacking the reader’s continuous experience of the text… Makoha’s experiments with form and his use of interruption and redirection challenge the borders of the poem, and at its best provide the blueprint for a burgeoning disruptive aesthetic that at times recklessly – and thrillingly – flies too close to the sun -- Zakia Carpenter-Hall * Jhalak Review * Extraordinary... Makoha is a bracing, challenging, agile poet – his writing is reminiscent of Aime Cesaire, in its powerful symbolism, but touched with the surreal edge of Nathaniel Mackey, the exhilarating shooting-for-the stars invention of Will Alexander... Makoha creates space for imagination and interpretation throughout, and in doing so he opens up the possibility of the disruption of the continuity of history – for something else to be imagined into being -- Nick Moss * Culture Matters * 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 One of our most daring and original poets, Nick Makoha has channelled the wild energies of Basquiat’s art into this essential new collection. These are poems layered with potent coordinates from African and world history, alongside the sensations of a Black Icarus in headlong flight, to create a new mythology all their own. Churning with codes, enigmas, unforgettable images, this is poetry that resonates with an emotive power that lies beyond immediate comprehension -- Sarah Howe * T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet of Loop of Jade * Just as Basquiat reinvented painting by experimenting with different methods of expression, so too does Nick Makoha. The New Carthaginians embarks on a poetic odyssey where Basquiat's art, the flight of Icarus, the echoes of Entebbe's history, and the enigmatic codex converge in a mesmerising reinvention of ekphrasis and myth making -- Roger Robinson * T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of A Portable Paradise * A work that’s ingenious and bold in its formal daring. In this book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go. Playful and sparkling with wonder, his dizzying linguistic pyrotechnics, replete with absurdist brushstrokes, remind me of the lyricism of Sony Lab’ou Tansi: intoxicating, a world all its own in the fabric of language -- Jason Allen-Paisant * TS Eliot prize-winning author of Self-Portrait as Othello * Nick Makoha's second collection invents a new kind of time. A poet always deeply engaged with the project of developing fresh terms, fresh language for hitherto unacknowledged narratives, in The New Carthaginians Makoha further realises his aims. He blends his own personal story, and the history within which that story is embedded, with others' artistic journeys—most particularly Basquiat, but we find Bruce Willis and Batman here too—to create a unique, resonant mythology -- Erica Wagner * consulting editor for Harper's Bazaar and contributing writer for The New Statesman * This incredible book reinvents ekphrasis, and finds a complex, convulsing language to mirror Basquiat's visual genius. It is a radical, radiant, furious meditation on what it means to be a Black artist in flight and in fall. An actual masterpiece -- Clare Pollard * poet and editor *

Author Information

Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London. 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.

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