THE NEW CARTHAGINIANS

92pp., paperback, Reprint, Penguin, London, (2025) 2026

ISBN: 9781802067071

Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration.

"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

"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

Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. His debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was published in 2017. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize.