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.

Born in Sierra Leone, Bertrand Bickersteth grew up in Edmonton, Calgary, and Olds, Alberta. Identified instantly as an athlete by innumerable school and community coaches, Bertrand only reluctantly began to use his brain in his twenties and soon after turned to writing. After an English degree at UBC, Bertrand committed himself to academia, continuing his studies and then teaching in the U.K. and later the U.S. A return to Alberta provided him with new insights on black identity and most of his writing has been committed to these perspectives ever since. Although he writes in several genres, anticlimactically, the topic is always the same: what does it mean to be black and from the prairies? He has presented variations on this topic at several academic conferences and in academic writings as well. He has also given many talks for the general public and, in 2015, delivered a TED Talk for BowValleyCollegeTEDx called The Weight of Words. In addition to his academic work, he has written a number of plays, one of which was excerpted during Black History Month, 2010 (produced by Centre Stage Theatre). His poetry has appeared in several publications, including most recently, The Antigonish Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Fieldstone Review. His poetry has also been published in The Great Black North and is forthcoming (2019) in The Black Prairie Archives. In 2018, he was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and no longer plays a single sport. The Response of Weeds is his debut collection and is a part of the Crow Said Poetry series.

Bertrand Bickersteth's profile page

• Winner, Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the Alberta Literary Awards
• Short-listed, City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards

Praise for The Response of Weeds:
"In its form and content, The Response of Weeds represents a vigorous and erudite excavation of history and a carefully constructed reclamation of place, both geographically located and culturally significant."
~ Valerie Mason-John, Quill & Quire
"[an] innovative and ambitious first collection"
~ Christine Wiesenthal, Alberta Views
"The Response of Weeds draws us into a confluence of geography, music, and identity, in which the voices of 20th Century Black artists fluidly merge with the prairies. In Bickersteth's interpretation we hear a blue modality and we feel Alberta sung as a point of arrival and departure, a junction in the diaspora. This collection questions place and belonging as it amplifies the Black prairie."
~ Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator
"In these poems, Bickersteth invites the reader to revisit the prairies as landscape, but also as part of Black history, geography, and psychic and poetic space. Readers lucky enough to travel with him through these lands will discover new meanings and agricultures (in every sense of the word), as well as uncomfortable and exquisite truths as Bickersteth retells the prairies and makes them new again. This is an essential book by an enormously talented writer."
~ Suzette Mayr, author of Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall
"A man can't step in the Athabasca River twice, because when he steps back in, it's a different river, and he's a different man. How much more transformation, then, when the river is the entire Atlantic Ocean and the land-length of North America? As a word-rider originally from Sierra Leone, poet Bertrand Bickersteth knows about wandering emotional and geographical distance, and is perhaps better suited than most to consider reality from multiple historical angles, since Sierra Leone is a nation of people who triumphed above of Western genocide on their own West African soil, and others who returned in the 19th Century from the Americas transformed and traumatized.
In The Response of Weeds, Bertrand Bickersteth is our wayfarer, drawing us-and the West Africans called 'Americans' he's tracking-across once-innocent prairies and lethal frozen landscapes in an exploration of our colonial, colonized Canadian history, and of ourselves. To whatever degree he's drawing upon his Sierra Leonean transatlantic perspective, he imparts a vision that is microscopic, telescopic, and kaleidoscopic, bearing witness to the pain and the beauty from the uncomfortably near and the philosophically far, and letting it all reflect back upon itself, and us. His verse, finely hewn, glitters with light that both dazzles and burns. He's the CanLit I never got to experience in all my time in school and university. If the CanLit gatekeepers will finally accept that literature doesn't need gated communities, Bertrand Bickersteth should be welcomed at every door."
~ Minister Faust, Kindred Award-winning author of Shrinking the Heroes