All Progress Will Be Lost
Reflective in every sense of the word, Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s All Progress Will Be Lost is both mirror and memory, bringing together nature and technology to produce surreal flashes of the world around us. Bernier-Cormier wields language like a sculptor uses a chisel, making the unyielding malleable, capturing fleeting moments frozen in time. “Metaphors,” he writes, “begin in the world, not in your head.”
The poems of this breathtaking collection blur the line between the interior and the exterior, calling artificiality and syntheticism into question, delving into the distance between source and echo. All Progress Will Be Lost approaches the climate emergency with both fear and hope, articulating the small, everyday apocalypses and the transient beauty of endings: fighting erosion with roses or free soloing what remains of a glacier.
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Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet. His poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize (2017) and Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award (2023). They have also been selected as finalists for the National Magazine Award, CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His first book, Correspondent, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. His second book, Entre Rive and Shore, a multilingual collection of poems, essays and translations that explore bilingualism and Acadian identity, won the Fred Cogswell Awad for Poetry. Bernier-Cormier teaches high school English in Vancouver, on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ.
