The New Carthaginians

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

The New Carthaginians creates an exciting multi-layered, double ekphrastic, collage of meanings, breaking narrative order, launching fragments into each other in order to understand and interpret the relationship of events. The images are vivid, the juxtapositions startling, the language direct and urgent. The book places us at the edge of a world looking over the abyss that constitutes it

George Szirtes, T.S. Eliot Prize-winner

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

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

A gravity defying thrill ride through time, space and language. This startling and audacious work is an odyssey, weaving through 1970s Kampala to Basquiat's 1980s New York, crafted as always with Makoha’s signature precision and sonorous humanity

Anthony Joseph, T.S. Eliot-winning author of Sonnets for Albert

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