The New Carthaginians - Nick Makoha

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2026'© Codex' SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEMLONGLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2026'Profound, sheer originality... a tantalising jigsaw puzzle of a book' Tristram Fane-Saunders, TelegraphIn 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 othe
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