Rattle Chapbook Prize
Deadline: January 15, 2025, 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time
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 the very first Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, Zeina Hashem Beck. It appears in 3arabi Song, published by Rattle in 2016.
Ghazal: Back Home
for Syria, September 2015
Tonight a little boy couldn't walk on water or row back home.
The sea turned its old face away. Again, there was a no, no, back home.Bahr* is how we were taught to measure poetry,
bahr is how we've stopped trying to measure sorrow, back home."All that blue is the sea, and it gives life, gives life," says God to the boy
standing wet at heaven's gate—does he want to return, to go back home?My friend who hates cooking has made that eggplant dish,
says nothing was better than yogurt and garlic and tomato, back home.On the train tracks, a man shouts, "Hold me, hold me," to his wife,
bites her sleeve, as if he were trying to tow back home.Thirteen-year-old Kinan with the big eyes says, "We don't want to stay in Europe."
"Just stop the war," he repeats, as if praying, Grow, grow back, home.Habibi, I never thought our children would write HELP US on cardboard.
Let's try to remember how we met years ago, back home.On our honeymoon we kissed by the sea, watched it
rock the lights, the fishing boats to and fro, back home.
* Bahr is Arabic for sea. Also, in Arabic poetry, bahr means meter.
