The New Carthaginians

Author Nick Makoha
Narrator Nick Makoha
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 27 February 2025
Run Time 2 hours and 6 minutes
Format Audio
Genre African history, Modern and contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards), Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Narrative theme: Politics, Narrative theme: Social issues, Poetry by individual poets.

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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 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©. 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.’

‘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.’ Jason Allen-Paisant, Winner of the TS Eliot Prize

© Nick Makoha 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

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

Guardian

An invigorating collection that summons Basquiat, Icarus and a cast of characters from literary and pop culture

Financial Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TS Eliot prize-winning author of Self-Portrait as Othello

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The New Carthaginians

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