Rattle Chapbook Prize
Deadline: January 15, 2026
The annual Rattle Chapbook Prize gives poets something truly special. Every year, three winners will each receive: $5,000 cash, 500 contributor copies, and distribution to Rattle's 8,000+ subscribers. In a world where a successful full-length poetry book might sell 1,000 copies, the winning book will reach an audience eight times as large on its release day alone—an audience that includes many other literary magazines, presses, and well-known poets. This will be a chapbook to launch a career.
And maybe the best part is this: The $30 entry fee is just a standard subscription to Rattle, which includes four issues of the magazine and three winning chapbooks, even if one of them isn't yours. Rattle is one of the most-read literary journals in the world—find out why just by entering! For more information, visit our website.
We congratulate our three winners from our 2025 contest:
- José Enrique Medina, Haunt Me
- Liz Robbins, Backlit
- Matthew Buckley Smith, The Soft Black Stars
Please enjoy this poem by 2025 winner Liz Robbins. It appears in Backlit, published by Rattle in 2025.
Cigarettes
The sex worker gives away
her body: her mouth, her nipples,
her mind. We say, they were giving
it away, about a store with goods
priced unusually low. The street
walker does go low: $15 for a blow,
$25 for sex. She bends down, she
bends over, lies beneath. The john's
car seconds as a motel bed. The dash
lit up like a plane, Johnny Cash
in the background. The best drug
remains anticipation, as the act
itself is never what we dreamed.
After, we're a little let down, emptied.
The sex worker opens the car door,
scans the street for a store to buy
Marlboros, all she wants. He'll drive
home darkly, fresh rationales singing
in his head. All inside, she's a column
of gray, a building on fire, a house
that's leaning, trying and failing to
run from the flames. In her head,
she's trained herself to hear only
the most recent tape: I walk the line.
Over and over, from the top floor,
only smoke escapes.
