Drakkar Noir by Michael Chang is the winner of the 2020/2021 BOOM Chapbook Contest

 

We had a whole bunch of really amazing & incredibly strong manuscripts sent to us this year.  To be honest, we really need that. When the world is going to hell and life seems pointless / locked down it helps to read a bunch of work that rises up / resists. As Jeanette Winterson so eloquently says in her essay Art Objects: Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die. Congratulations, Michael! Look for Drakkar Noir in the spring of 2021.

 

A Lambda Literary fellow, MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) was awarded the Kundiman Scholarship at the Miami Writers Institute. A finalist in contests at the Iowa Review, BOMB, NightBlock, & many others, their poems have been nominated for Best of the Net & the Pushcart Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Bateau navigates through pandemics & recessions & lost funding & funding found & Mahoney’s onrushing midlife crisis, it makes sense for us to work with Miss Expanding Universe (aka Ashley Yang-Thompson) on a book project that is not a typical Bateau chapbook. A project that involves something else.  Something we have never done before.  Something akin to wonder.  So keep your eyes open for How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER headed your way sometime in the early fall of 2021.

 

Ashley Yang-Thompson aka Miss Expanding Universe produces a weekly zine, WORM HOUSE: the only source of real news in the world / bringing Las Vegas to the Berkshires.

Sault Ste. Marie by Jeff Ewing

FM by Matthew Lippman

Jonah by Elizabeth Robinson

Weltshmerz by Kevin Tosca

The Old Fashioned Way by Dinah Cox

Speaks the Dark Lobe by L. I. Henley

Drakkar Noir by Michael Chang

How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER by Ashley Yang Thompson

Still Life with Skull, Cluster of Grapes, Nintendo 64 Controller by Jim Redmond

Major League Gaming by Devin Taylor

Indigent by Elizabeth Robinson

The Pocket Oracle by Sharon Dolin

In the Whale by Halo Lahnert

 

Bateau wishes to give a shout out to everyone who entered this year’s contest. Your writing is fierce, amazing, and really fucking needed.  Thank you for sharing it with us.

Dearest Family

We at Bateau Press have been thinking things over, confronting the hard truth that there is no way we can publish a Bateau Lit Mag in the year of the plague, lost revenue from AWP & COA, and hope to survive.  So: BATEAU PRESS IS NOT GOING TO PUBLISH A LIT MAG IN 202O.  We will publish a Lit Mag in 2021 once the world is sane again.  Will it be sane again?

The entire literary landscape might dissolve. Magazines and small presses might become smoke. We are lucky that we have student labor and institutional support but who knows what the next five years will look like. Bateau might die five years from now, or a decade from now, but for the time being, WE WILL LIVE. We will run the chapbook contest in the fall. Instead of relying on outside designers and printers, we will bring the letterpress printing and design of our chaps and lit mags onto the COA campus. This has always been the plan, now we are fast-forwarding.  We will be more ruthless in our exploitation of student labor. ((the kids love it!!!))

We will also reenvision what it means to publish a lit mag in the post COVID-19 landscape. We might become a record label. We might become a dreamscape or a seagull. Check out what Sleeperhold Publications is up to.  Whatever we become it will be a physical object, it will have to do with creating art that affirms life, and it will be beautiful. Most likely a lit mag but a seagull would be fucking awesome!

Love,

Bateau

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