The New Carthaginians

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.'