The Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies (PB) (2020)

Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award!
Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Winner of a 2021 High Plains Book Award for First Book!
Finalist for the 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!
A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year!
Finalist for a 2021 High Plains Book Award for Poetry

Bertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.