Rattle Chapbook Prize
Deadline: January 15, 2024
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 $25 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 2023 contest:
- Arthur Russell, At the Car Wash (Fall 2023)
- Miracle Thornton, Plucked (Winter 2023)
- George Bilgere, Cheap Motels of My Youth (Spring 2023)
Please enjoy this poem by 2021 winner Gil Arzola. It's the title poem to his chapbook, published by Rattle in 2021.
The Death of a Migrant Worker
My father died in the bathtub, his head
banging against the stainless-steel handles.
The blood from his head—useless now—poured out,
slow as thick soup.It was no concern of his.
His life had ended before any of that.The blood, he didn't need anymore, was the only thing moving; the rest of him—
arms that had worked a thousand fields,
held his babies and hauled buckets of coal for the stove.
His hands calloused, that had tried to mend unfixable things,
and one leg crooked from a break
that never healed right ...
all of it motionless now.
Dead before he hit anything.My father died in mid-air like a bird
shot out of the sky, like a hawk circling then
disappearing beyond a horizon, falling—
somewhere out of my reach.