Rattle Chapbook Prize
Deadline: January 15, 2025
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 2024 contest:
- Eric Kocher, Sky Mall (Fall 2024)
- Denise Duhamel, In Which (Winter 2024)
- Kat Lehmann, no matter how it ends a bluebird's song (Spring 2025)
Please enjoy this poem by 2023 winner George Bilgere. It appears in Cheap Motels of My Youth, published by Rattle in 2024.
Abandoned Bicycle
A bicycle—a nice one—
has been locked to the lamp post
all summer and fall.
Tires gone flat.
A congregation of leaves
worshipping the wheels.
And on the brake levers
and the tiny bolts
that held the seat exactly
where someone wanted it to be,
rust is constructing
its sprawling embassies.
Maybe a drunk drifted
over yellow lines. A clot
formed in the thigh
and moved north.
Or somebody just got
sick and tired.
Anyway, the bike is waiting.
Its metals gleam urgently.
Soon the scavengers will come.
The pedals—unable to live
without each other—will vanish
into a fresh new marriage.
The seat will disappear
into a seat-shaped abyss.
One night, someone
will help himself to a wheel.
Not quite a bicycle,
but a start.
And the bike,
like an abandoned person,
will become a clock,
calibrated to measure
the precise duration
of loneliness.
