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 othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life.