Tenderfoot by Chris Beckett
How does a boy grow up happy with hunger and inequality in the world?
A tenderfoot as a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here he is a white boy growing up in 1960’s Ethiopia, a place and people he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he remembers rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets, a sort of diary. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, his book teems with praise shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. It is about waking up to storms and droughts, hunger and desire, to donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa; to what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body, a human transformation!
ISBN: 978 1 784109 71 4 Carcanet Poetry, July 2020 Price: £11.99
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY TENDERFOOT!
How does a boy grow up happy with hunger and inequality in the world?
A tenderfoot as a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here he is a white boy growing up in 1960’s Ethiopia, a place and people he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he remembers rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets, a sort of diary. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, his book teems with praise shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. It is about waking up to storms and droughts, hunger and desire, to donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa; to what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body, a human transformation!
ISBN: 978 1 784109 71 4 Carcanet Poetry, July 2020 Price: £11.99
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY TENDERFOOT!
