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daisy_bey 's review for:
The New Carthaginians
by Nick Makoha
New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha is a collection of poems. The book itself is separated into three main parts, „The Deep Space Quartet“ (which is, as the name already suggests, made of four parts), „Codex©“ and „Eroica“. The collections contains various forms of poems and also contains ekphrastic images.
Before reading the book, I would suggest looking into the hijacking of the Air France flight in 1976 and the Raid of Entebbe (also known as Operation Thunderbolt), that was launched as a counter-mission/attack to the hijacking. In addition to that, I’d also recommend looking up the famous Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The author doesn’t just incorporate Basquiat and his artworks into his collection of poems, but built this entire collection using Basquiat’s „Exploded Collage“ approach/technique as a „poetic device“ (p. 87).
The book is overall very thought-provoking. One of the main things I didn’t really like were the poems with footnotes. While the incorporation of footnotes is a very interesting idea, the poems also became a little hard to follow, since the switching between the poem itself and the footnotes broke my reading flow.
My personal favourite poems were:
- „Icarus talks to the poet on Rodeo Drive about leaving“
- „the poet as Cassius Clay 1982“
- „The New Carthaginian“
- „Icarus asks Basquiat to Paint Him“
- „Codex©“ (p. 75)
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for giving me access to this ARC. :)