“The debut poetry collection of Nick Makoha, a young poet of Ugandan heritage. This first collection brings to mind shaman in his combination of biblical speak and magical imagery”

Roger Robinson

“Nick Makoha's poems animate in the space between story and song. His sentences unwind full of ‘axe heads, shanks, short rope, blades, some poison and all its animal understanding.’ His imagery and insights are strung along an electrified syntax. He writes, ‘You will try to make sense of the terrain, its limits on reality, its secondary sounds – the crickets speaking pure rhetoric.’ I find the terrains of his thinking and feeling breathtaking. Kingdom Of Gravity is truly an amazing debut.”

Terence Hayes

“The Kingdom of Gravity is also that of graveyards that follow military rules and all varieties of authoritarianism in post colonial Africa. Makoha reminds me of Brecht who once wrote that even in the dark times, there will be singing about the dark times. His poetry is full of telling lines and images that capture the uneasy synthesis of the clear and the contradictory, the menacing and the promising, the ugly and the beautiful, but images that burn long into memory of the reader.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

“What history will the poets write? In Kingdom of Gravity, Nick Makoha writes the tale left untold after the soldiers, politicians, reporters and priests have spoken. His words ring into memory, into silence, into the body. This is a poet’s archive of the unsaid, but also much more than that. How exquisitely the tale is told, at last. Carrying finely wrought metaphors, every page stopped my breath. In these poems, the sky is “an iris of black glass” and truly “There are days/ when this unplanned landscape speaks its music.” This is a collection by a poet of extraordinary gifts.”

Gabeba Baderoon

“There is in Makoha’s work an intriguing balance between the immediate and the stately that fits his material and offers possibilities for expansion and further exploration. All that – his personal history, the history of his country and the leaving of it – suggests to me a talent at the beginning of a genuinely important road.”

George Szirtes