Winner, Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry
Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Longlisted, Nelson Ball Poetry Prize
“I used to think this was a book about a disguise,
but now I know that it’s a book about translation.”

According to Cormier family lore, Pierrot Cormier escaped a British prison the night before the Acadian Deportation by disguising himself in a dress. In the invigorating, transliterative Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier uses his ancestor’s escape to ponder what it means to live between two languages. Writing in a blend of English and French that evokes Chiac, “a living thing, growing gills, a voice from the future, prophetic and clear,” Bernier-Cormier probes the mutability of language and of translation.

A heady mix of English renderings of a single French poem, a Franco-fusion mélange of reflections on Acadian history and identity, and meditations on the evolution of language and the rapper Young Thug, Entre Rive and Shore exhibits “an eloquence we aren’t attuned to.” The result is protean, an exhilarating collection that reassesses what it means to live between two identities, two worlds, two languages.

Dominique Bernier-Cormier was born in Quebec and spent the summers of his childhood on New Brunswick's Acadian coast. But he grew up in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing, where his father worked as a foreign Correspondent for CBC/Radio Canada television. Bernier-Cormier won the Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem in 2017 for "Fabric." His poems have also been shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, Arc's Poem of the Year Award, CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize, and a National Magazine Award. His chapbook, Englishing, was published by Frog Hollow Press in spring 2017. He is currently a poetry editor for Rahila's Ghost Press. Correspondent is his first book.

Dominique Bernier-Cormier's profile page

• Long-listed, Nelson Ball Poetry Prize
• Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
• Winner, Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry