Rattle Poetry Prize
Deadline: July 15, 2024
The annual Rattle Poetry Prize celebrates its 19th year with a 1st prize of $15,000 for a single poem. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. All of these poems will be published in the winter issue of the magazine.
With the winners judged in a masked review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine—and a runner-up Readers' Choice Award to be chosen by the writers themselves—the Rattle Poetry Prize aims to be one of the most writer-friendly and popular poetry contests around.
We accept entries online and by mail. See Rattle's website for the complete guidelines and to read all of the past winners.
Please enjoy last year's Rattle Poetry Prize winner by Ardon Shorr, published in Rattle #82, Winter 2023:
TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS
Every crumb of starlight
sails across the universe,the journey of a million years
to end inside our eyes.Except I was looking at you,
canvas coverall cinched at the waist,as you undressed me with photons,
wrapped me in stories,painted with x-rays,
until everything glowedwith backstory—the names of trees,
the name of an extinguished star,still visible, ghost in the sky,
climbing a staircase of optic nerveinto an afterlife of sight.
Hand on my hand you pointed to the past:the sun, an 8-minute time machine,
the moon, one second old,and the incredible now,
unfolding like a cone,megaphone of memory stretched to the sky
and balanced on the tip was us,a luminous shout
of life at the speed of light.In a blink, this moment reaches the moon.
When we pack up the hammock, it floatsin the acid clouds of Venus.
Which means that somewhere, there is a spot,past the gaps in Saturn’s rings,
beyond the storms of Jupiter,outside the curved embrace of the Milky Way,
at least one place in the universe,where you could turn around and see us,
back when we were still in love.