Prairie Edge
- Sep 19, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
★★★★★
I spotted Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge at Red Fern Booksellers in Salina, Kansas, when I was there for the town’s annual Spring Poetry Series back in April. Its stark cover featuring a closely cropped bison on a large field of yellow did its job and immediately caught this designer’s eye. (It doesn’t hurt that the bison is my power animal). I didn’t buy the book, however, merely added it to the list, which is a little too easy to do. Like most of the books on the want-to-read list, as I reflected in my recent review of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, it was likely to go unread. Except, like Odell’s book, fate or luck intervened: I found it sitting on an end table at the office. Though the book’s presumptive owner had made it to either page 17 or 18, he or she had left it behind and would be gone for at least the next two weeks. I snagged it and began reading that night.
The title, Prairie Edge, speaks to both the marginalization of the Métis at the center of the story and, to me, at least, evokes straight edge, the hardcore punk subculture and lifestyle of abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in which I was an active part throughout my high school and college days. Though straight edge isn’t about taking direct action, there was definitely an activist mindset that permeated the scene at the time (and may still). Many of us were involved in other causes (e.g., animal rights, environmentalism), and some of those causes had militant, direct-action-oriented factions. We were aware of, even if we weren’t directly participants in, direct action being taken in many forms for many causes. So, though this second interpretation is oddly specific to me, it wasn’t a big leap to read into the book’s title a connection to the direct action being taken by its protagonists, Ezzy and Grey.
Alternating in first-person accounts from Ezzy and Grey, Kerr has written an electrifying novel that I was as hungry to read as I was distraught by its themes of dislocation, poverty, violence, and cultural drift, in part because there remains a hopefulness that, despite all obstacles, it might be possible to make a difference. Have Ezzy and Grey knocked over the first domino that will set off a chain reaction for long-term change, or will the powerful forces of stasis triumph? And if they have, will they be around to see it? Will they know what it looks like?
I’ll spoil neither what Ezzy and Grey do nor whether it makes a difference. But, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, profound change is often slow, indirect, and cumulative; that collective action, rather than immediate results, is key. What happens—the story after this story, and where it goes, or grows—resides in our imaginations. That, as Amitav Ghosh argues in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, is exactly what we need: “When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement, they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.”
Ten days on, Prairie Edge still lingers and haunts. Part of it is that, at the tallgrass preserve we are fighting to protect just outside Manhattan, Kansas, we have our own long-term hopes of restoring the bison. Though buffalo haven’t lived here since the mid-1800s, their wallows survive, and I can feel their presence when I walk the land. Our methods, should we be fortunate enough to accomplish it, will certainly not be those of Ezzy and Grey, but the methods employed don’t alter the shared desire. Part of it is that, as Americans, we have an idyllic image of what we think Canadians are like. Though I’ve been to Canada several times—Toronto, Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto, yes, but visited on a separate trip), Montreal, Vancouver—I was either a youth or there on business, which narrows both the number and types of interactions I’ve had, so my overall impressions come, for better or worse, from Michael Moore documentaries. Even though Canadians may leave their doors unlocked, have universal healthcare, and suffer from dramatically less gun violence, colonialism, racist governmental policies, and anti-indigenous bigotries look an awful lot like what we have here at home. Lastly, part of it is embodied by the Mahatma Gandhi quote, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” We live in an era of expanding detachment, isolation, and hopelessness. Access and exposure to better stories in which people can see themselves, not necessarily as heroes but as real people, not caricatures, with hopes and dreams and fears and, most importantly, with agency, is one of the most powerful ways we can become the change we wish to see in the world. With the current assaults on freedom of speech, DEI policies, uncomfortable truths about our shared history, and access to books that tell stories and feature protagonists that make some uncomfortable, we need, now more than ever, writers like Conor Kerr and publishers like the University of Minnesota Press.
Comments