Numinous Animal explores the eclipsed history of Black cowboys on the Prairies. Part memoir, part regional history, and part literary analysis, it follows a journey of discovery through 19th- and early 20th-century cattle brands. Bickersteth confronts the legacy of branding in his own family history as someone descended from people who were touched by slavery. In tracing his family's complicated ties to slavery, he traces lines that connect West Africa to Nova Scotia, Edmonton to Freetown, the Underground Railroad to Cowboy trails. In this way, Numinous Animal serves as a bridge between African and Albertan historical legacies. The culmination of tracing these paths is a tantalizingly poetic collision between the oubli of the archive and the promise of Afrofuturism: the creation of a font traced from the cattle brands of Black cowboys and ranchers in Alberta. Bickersteth's artistry deconstructs marks of livelihood, ownership, and dehumanization, and reconstructs them into a language of life, freedom, and love.

Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award! Finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and The 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards! A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year! Finalist for the 2021 High Plains Book Awards in the Poetry and First Book categories 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.