Book – Bertrand Bickersteth

The Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies

Winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2020), the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (2020), and the High Plains Book Awards (first book category).

Finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta Awards (three categories).

“I know these rivers that flow through me
I’ve peered into their hearts and still you do not see me”

This poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan. In places it is historical, offering a window on often overlooked contributions to the province’s character. In other places it is biographical, providing personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. But always it is geographical, investing its language and vision in the contours of the land itself. One thing we can all share as Albertans is the deep and paradoxical sense of attachment we have to a land whose natural powers are both independently awestriking and dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here, too.

Published by NeWest Press, April, 2020

Both music and persona are carried by the rivers that course through Alberta’s territory. We meet the Bow, the Peace, the Athabasca, and the Oldman, but we hear them differently. In Bickersteth’s interpretation we hear a blue modality, one that pays respect to the Sarcee and Blackfoot, and we feel Alberta sung as a point of arrival and departure, a junction in the diaspora.
Kaie Kellough, Griffin Prize winner and author of Magnetic Equator (Penguin Random House).

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