Review: Beaver Hills Forever by Conor Kerr
Reviewed by Jeremy Allard
Beaver Hills Forever is the latest book by Metis author Conor Kerr. His debut novel, Avenue of Champions was longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, and his most recent novel, Prairie Edge, was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. Presumably, he’s currently working on whatever novel will win the 2026 Giller Prize, but, in the meantime, he’s released this “Metis Poetic Novella,” a slim 84 page volume that packs an outsized narrative punch.
There is no strict definition of “poetic novella”, but it seems to generally be a novella—a single narrative between a short story and a novel in length—told in a series of poems—hence “poetic.” Usually, these stories are told from a variety of perspectives, and the overarching plot unfolds gradually across many brief, poetic, entries.
In his personal variation on the concept, the “Metis Poetic Novella,” what Kerr has done is not so much pioneer a new genre but rather find a niche idea in the colonial literary tradition that he can co-opt for his own purposes. In past interviews, Kerr has explained that his goal as a writer is to tell the sorts of stories he grew up hearing from both his Ukrainian grandfather and his Metis grandmother, what he calls “true oral storytelling.” Given that the cadence of the poems immediately put me in mind of “Stories of the Road Allowance People” by Maria Campbell, I think he has very much succeeded.
