“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

“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.” 
— Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire (full review)

“[an] innovative and ambitious first collection”
— Christine Wiesenthal, Alberta Views

“Bickersteth’s vision powerfully highlights the erasure of Black communities in the Prairies and claims those histories and presences in the movements of land. The Response of Weeds is a work of research of a stunning range, occupying a powerful space in Canadian poetry. It reveals through its polyvocality and song-like lyricism the stories that no one else can tell but that generously involve and include the reader. Bickersteth’s work re-inserts the presence of Black subjectivity into 'an easing confluence/ that confuses complaint in this country' that makes us realize what we lose by not attending to these dramatis personae of invisible men and women, made visible by his vivid figuration.”
— Jurors for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

“The Response of Weeds calls and responds to the power of the word. This exceptional collection probes place, race, and history through the manipulation of language. These formidable poems, each expressed in a powerful voice, use jazz and biography to destabilize the presumed history of a Western province through its geographical features and flora.” 
— Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry Jury

“With dazzling artistry, Bickersteth blends music, history, landscape, and human struggle into a remarkable collection that explores the often-hidden experiences of black people on the northern prairie. This book challenges us to think about how our stories define our places and ourselves, and to see how those left out become invisible within our larger narratives of regional, national, and global identity.” 
— Danell Jones, Billings Gazette (full review)

"Bickersteth’s book chronicles a long and nuanced story of displacement and belonging, of finding a way to enter into relationship with the land, even as that same relationship and sense of agency are denied."
— Jenna Butler, Read Alberta (full review)