April 13, 2022

Dear Readers,

This week, a change in the system that delivers our daily poem by email made it impossible for us to format the poems correctly. To restore the quality of the reading experience, we’ve moved to the Constant Contact platform. I was able to migrate about 75% of daily poem subscribers manually, but that wasn’t possible for over 2,000 of you who had signed up through your WordPress.com accounts.

If you received today’s poem by Anis Mojgani through Constant Contact, you’re all set. If you did NOT receive today’s poem, though, and would like to continue receiving them every day, please sign up again here—and find the confirmation link in your inbox after you do. Be sure to check your spam folder or promotions tab. Sorry for the inconvenience!

On the positive side, the new system has many features that will make the daily email even better.

Cheers,
Tim

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April 15, 2016

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Rattle Chapbook Prize:
 

Zeina Hashem Beck

3arabi Song
Zeina Hashem Beck
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet whose first collection, To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), won the 2013 Backwaters Prize. It was also runner-up for the 2014 Julie Suk Award, category finalist for the 2015 Eric Hoffer Awards, and has been included on Split This Rock’s list of recommended poetry books for 2014. Her work has been repeatedly nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Poetry Daily, The Common, Rattle, 32 Poems, Mslexia, Magma, and The Rialto, among others. Her poetry manuscript, Louder than Hearts, has been recently named runner-up for the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Zeina is a strong performer of her poems, and she regularly reads at festivals, poetry events, theaters, schools, and universities around the Middle East. She lives in Dubai, where she has founded and runs the poetry and open mic collective PUNCH. (website)

Two of Zeina Hashem Beck’s poems, not included with the manuscript, have appeared in our Poets Respond series: “Ghazal: Back Home” and “Ya’aburnee.” You can also watch her perform the chapbook’s title poem, “3arabi Song,” with the Fayha Choir in Lebanon, here.

For the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, we received an incredible 1,720 entries, and a great number of impressive manuscripts that deserve to be published. In order to maximize the impact of the competition, we’ve decided to also offer publication to three runners-up. 3arabi Song will be distributed to all 7,500+ subscribers along with an issue at the end of the year; one of the runners-up will also be distributed to each subscriber at random, so that everyone receives two chapbooks. All four chapbooks will be available for individual sale.

Runners-Up:

 

Kill the Dogs
Heather Bell
Oswego, NY

Ligatures
Denise Miller
Kalamazoo, MI

Turn Left Before Morning
April Salzano
New Castle, PA

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September 15, 2015

Rattle is proud to announce the winners of the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize:

1st Prize – $10,000

 

Tiana Clark, photo by Andrea Yelk

“Equilibrium”
Tiana Clark
Brentwood, TN

__________

Finalists – $200

 

“Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks”
Christopher Citro
Liverpool, NY

“Work in Progress”
Rhina P. Espaillat
Newburyport, MA

“The Glance”
Jennifer Givhan
Albuquerque, NM

“Morning at the Welfare Office”
Valentina Gnup
Oakland, CA

“Old Age Requires the Greatest Courage”
Red Hawk
Monticello, AR

“More Than This”
David Kirby
Tallahassee, FL

“Yesterday”
Travis Mossotti
St. Louis, MO

“Sugar Babe”
Cherise A. Pollard
West Chester, PA

“Deus ex Machina”
Melissa King Rogers
Decatur, GA

“Elegy”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

 

These eleven poems will be published in issue #50 of Rattle this December. Each of the finalists are also eligible for the $2,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2015 – February 15, 2016).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets have been notified individually about details, but they are: George Bilgere, Christopher Citro, Taylor Collier, Jennifer Givhan, Chris Green, M, S.H. Lohmann, Christine Poreba, and Laura Read.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 4,022 entries and roughly 15,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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February 15, 2015

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2014 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award:

Courtney Kampa

Courtney Kampa
New York, NY
for
Poems About Grace

The 2014 Readers’ Choice Award was selected from among the Rattle Poetry Prize Finalists by subscriber vote. Only those with active subscriptions including issue #46 were eligible. Of roughly 4,000 possible voters, 565 cast ballots, and Kampa’s poem earned 31%. The award is $1,000. Here is what some of those readers had to say about their choice:

So beautifully done, about a subject that could easily have become overly sentimental were it not for the restraint the poet shows. The words, well chosen, perfectly convey the longing of both child and (new) mother. A memorable piece of work!
—Susan Berlin

“Poems About Grace” is touching and significant. Rarely has a poem about motherhood drawn me so completely into the experience. The whole context of the adoption is brought forth vividly and with immediacy, involving the reader in the confluence of needs and yearnings that bring mother and daughter together. This is a poem that deserves to find its way to anthologies and be kept for a very long time. Obviously this is a writer to pay attention to.
—David W. Parsley

The expression of love for one’s child moved with a soft beautiful rhythm. The poem danced in metaphor and sent me running to hug my own children.
—Thomas Leduc

The way her poems connect thought and emotion from section to section produces a vibrant awareness of the interconnectedness between a mother and daughter who find their own familiarity when blood doesn’t lend it freely, a feeling expressed masterfully in the last line: “Our dangling threads/ crocheted into a trellis, like lace—a helix/ we’ve doubled and twisted/ by hand.” In this last line’s holding out of the message for the poem as a whole, the reader is confronted with the truth of Kampa’s words for parents and children generally, whether adopted or no. The trellis shape of each stanza, the transience of thin lace, and the helix which both acts as genetic inheritance and a handmade ladder to what will come in their future lives all rise to the attention of the reader in this last phrasing. Kampa’s final words crystallize for a brief moment the simultaneous feelings of having created a newfound strength and the excitement of the questions and conversations for the mother and daughter that are yet to come.
—Jeremy Reed

I thought this sequence was the most moving and original among the finalist poems, well-crafted yet unpredictable in its turns, with a strangeness that struck me as true to the experience recounted, and not something imposed on the poem from without. Some of the similes and metaphors made me gasp. I love the danger in this work, and the openness.
—Cecilia Woloch

“Poems About Grace” is a heart-breakingly beautiful, poignant poem about grace of all kinds. On the literal level it is a simple story of a couple who longs for a child, then finds and adopts a baby from a harsh, over-crowded orphanage. She becomes the beloved child. The five part poem speaks to the nature of grace during this journey. The “Grace” of the title may be the name of the baby, but “grace” is the poem’s unifying metaphor for the tender-fierce love that throbs in every line.
—Margaret Anne Gratton

To read the poem, pick up a copy of Rattle #46, or wait until the spring, when the poems start appearing online at Rattle.com.

Kampa’s “Poems About Grace” was the clear winner, but all ten of the finalist poems received a significant number of votes, and each had their own enthusiastic fans. It’s always a fun and informative experience reading all the commentary, and to provide a taste of that here is a small sample of what our subscribers said about the other finalists:

On Josh Bontrager’s “My Father Worked Piece Rate …”

As many times as the read the poem to myself, and out loud to my partner who was sitting next to me at the diner, him reading his mortgage blog and saying, “Oh yea, I remember, the Schult Mobile Home Plant was a real thing.” And that’s why my vote for this poem, it’s too real. It’s as tangible in an ephemeral world as the men in work boots sitting in the booths around us, and the steam that comes from their coffee into their own trucks, with their own stories. But we tell the one how they’re all the same.
—Victoria McArtor

On Samantha Deal’s “Taxonomy of an Automobile Accident”

“Taxonomy of an Automobile Accident” by Samantha Deal is one of those poems you want to show to others–I printed it off and shared it with my wife who did a PhD thesis, some years ago, in the acquisition of language in children. I found her comment to be telling: “Naming is where the world begins.” This poem takes the reader to school, and on so many levels. The line “How many hands am I not holding / right now?” is the turn line for me … From that point on I know that I’m in the sort of “good hands” I recognize from having been exposed to forceful work before. Smart work, indeed.
—Roy Bentley

On Stephen Kampa’s “How to Meet the Love of Your Life”

It’s rare that a poem makes me laugh out loud, but Stephen Kampa had me laughing through all four pages. He nails the voice of the self-help book, in a poem styled like no other.
—Melvin Gulley

On James Davis May’s “Reality Auction”

Witty, refreshing and entertaining in a way that lasts like a conversation we keep having about our favourite film or character in a book. I wish I could have attended the auction.
—Vanessa Shields

On Jack Powers’ “Holy Shitballs!”

This is a poem that effortlessly maneuvers within a surprisingly wide range of narrative complexity. It’s funny and touching and not in the least sentimental (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
—Arne Weingart

On Sarah Pemberton Strong’s “A Story”

As a poem that is interested in how we think, it struck me how free of artifice or pretension it is, how clear and honest. It shares a remarkable story, reflects on that story, and in this act it shines light on how we react to the unusual, the unexpected, the miraculous–and that moment we are given where the boy returns to find the snake transformed into the mouse (at least, that must be what the scene first looked like to him)—is as close to a miracle as poetry is able to give us. And to show the reader the search for self in this story, the projection of one’s own identity into another’s situation, another’s body, is shockingly affecting, beautifully honest.
—Brandon Amico

On Wendy Videlock’s “The Night Relies”

The music in this piece is stunning, and though rhymed tetrameter lines can often sound singsongy or contrived, there’s something hymn-like about this piece that invites that form. It is especially effective, in fact, against the content (“the camouflage is in conforming”), which praises the rebellious spirit and the potential to rabble-rouse that live within the mythological and theological icons she invokes; to have a regular meter, a ringing bell of a poem, stands in contrast to the beauty of singing one’s own tune. Anyway, it’s pretty and I’m a fan of sound-play, and she does it well.
—Jessica Piazza

On Mike White’s “Fathers”

“Fathers” is dense and pointed, in a way that allows it to be truly wide and open to its enormous spirit. I also loved the word play. It reminds me of my father’s basement workshop, which was both a place to create and a place to hide.
—Scott Farrar

On Shangrila Willy’s “The Nightly Villanelle of Their Twelfth Year”

Willy dares to speak of impotence in a marriage, not that uncommon due to a variety of issues, often health-related. She uses the villanelle form with its repeating lines in conjunction with carefully chosen words that serve double-meanings for reflecting the unspoken desire (“ache”), the nagging fears (“long”), and wishful thinking (“lie”) that refrain in permutations in the lines as it does in the minds of the couple as they consider their untenable situation. She also conveys the back and forth from dream state to waking state that one often experiences lying in bed thinking intertwined with the other’s thinking, from the contrasting realities conveyed in the 1st and 3rd lines that are repeated in the form: “she lies awake/ he longs for her to wake.” I applaud Willy for her brilliant layering of mind, dream, and state of being.
—Sandra P. Wassilie

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March 8, 2014

2014 NEIL POSTMAN AWARD FOR METAPHOR WINNER

Francesca Bell photo by Roger Minkow

Francesca Bell
Novato, CA
Where We Are Most Tender

In honor and remembrance of Neil Postman, who died on October 5th, 2003, we have established the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. The intention of the award is simple and two-fold: to reward a given writer for his or her use of metaphor, and to celebrate (and, hopefully, propagate) Postman’s work and the typographical mind. Each year the editors choose one poem from all of the submissions Rattle received during the previous year. There are no entry fees or special guidelines involved; all submissions to Rattle are automatically considered. The author of the chosen poem receives $500.

Rattle is proud to announce Francesca Bell’s “Where We Are Most Tender,” which appeared in issue #40, as winner of the 2014 Neil Postman Award.

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February 15, 2014

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award:

Anna Evans

Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX
for
“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”

The 2013 Readers’ Choice Award was selected from among the Rattle Poetry Prize Finalists by subscriber vote. Only those with active subscriptions including issue #42 were eligible. Of roughly 3,500 possible voters, 786 cast ballots, and Howell’s poem earned 18.8%. Here is what some of those readers had to say about their choice:

Direct, simple and powerful. Lest we forget, and this poet obviously has not, the pragmatism of those who cannot afford the currently-in-fashion idealism of the affluent, which masquerades as reality and isn’t (for so many in the world), should not be confused with lack of love or caring. This poem reminds me of the seemingly harsh but, for me, liberating world view of my English (maternal) grandmother, who raised her family in the midst of deprivation caused by two world wars and the Depression era. She spoke in proverbs, which expressed her belief in the real—the “what is” as opposed to the “what should be”—and brushed my hair too hard, hurting my scalp and said it was good for me. I have never known such strong and fierce and real love as hers.
—Lesley Constable

I want to vote for Rebecca Gayle Howell’s “My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children.” I’m especially impressed by the poem’s ability to create and negate feeling without straying outside of itself. The mother’s harshness is harsh, tender, and the aftermath of struggle, and the daughter simultaneously resents and comprehends its expression. It’s a relationship in all the simplest and most complex sense of the word. Fantastic.
—Calvin Olsen

What really brings the poem home for me are the third through sixth stanzas where the poet describes her mother giving her head rough treatment when she received a shampoo and then transitioning with the words “… the water rushing hard. It felt like drowning, her tenderness” to tell how her mother herself sat in bath water after nine other family members had used it while at the same time outside the poet’s maternal grandmother was cutting off a chicken’s head. The kitchen knife in the second stanza was mentioned as being practical but at that point in the poem any household implement would have served the same purpose as a symbol of practicality. The soft focus on the knife resolves itself into a backwards-looking sharp clarity with grandma giving that chicken’s head some of that same rough treatment that seems to run across three generations. I hope this gives some sense of what the poem meant for me and how I felt the poet effectively conveyed the grittiness of her family struggling to survive and to remain decent folks at the same time.
—William Cullen Jr

Ms. Howell handles feeling in just the way I like—simply, directly, and without sentimentality. Also, I’ve grown a bit tired of irony in contemporary poetry, those workshopped lines that suggest writing poetry is cultic and not an art form that should strive for a measure of universality. In “My Mother,” the imagery is powerful: I am moved by the sharp picture of her mother, as a little girl, “sitting in the dirty water alone,” and the line (sorry, I’m going from memory) “… instead our estate was honesty/ which is not tenderness” has stayed with me all night—wish I could have written it. It’s a very smart thing to put into a poem, this denial of a connection between honesty and tenderness. I find honest mostly untender, even cruel, especially in families. The last short bit is perfect—this is free verse, but there’s structure to it, just enough to keep the poem honest. Nice work. I hope Ms. Howell wins the cool grand! Most of all, I hope she keep writing.
—George Ovitt

The images presented in the poem are striking—a harsh picture of a difficult childhood, where the one person who should be a child’s protector is, perhaps, the one to be protected from. This poem stayed with me in a way many poems do not. The narrator’s pain bleeds through the words.
—Carol A. Stephen

To read the poem, pick up a copy of Rattle #42, or—why not?—download a PDF of the 10 finalist poems here. Use the comments below to let us know which poem you would have chosen.

Howell’s “My Mother Told Us” was the clear winner, but all ten of the finalist poems received a significant number of votes, and each had their own enthusiastic fans. No one received less than 4.9%—1 in 20 readers would have selected any of the poems a winner. That’s always the best lesson to take away from any award in poetry: tastes are subjective. As a testament to that, here are just a few of the many comments we received about the other finalists:

On “A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want to Have Children” by Chanel Brenner:

Most often a poem draws me in and holds me by such elements as striking metaphor or crisp description or rhythmical music in the lines, but Chanel Brenner’s poem comes at me powerfully from a different direction. With an austere and unadorned approach, in a plain-spoken manner, the poem begins with a series of negative assertions, the speaker declining to advance several commonly voiced or stereotypical benefits of motherhood. Then, immediately following this list, the speaker delivers two straightforward statements, two declarations that strike the reader suddenly, like tragedy and joy. There is also much to like in the structure of the poem: the rhetorical technique, the use of parallelism, the clipped line length at the end of the poem. The poet’s use of craft reveals to the reader a knowledge that cannot be explained but only felt. Poems that speak to our immediate or personal experiences are the ones that often mean the most to us.
—Richard Meyer

On “Baby Love” by Courtney Kampa:

While a long poem can lose a reader with too many details, I was with the poet every word and line of the way. I admired the way she kept weaving the details of her experience in and out of each other in time, making them gather momentum through the end of the poem which explodes with Gregory as present today as in 5th grade, her love for him larger than ever, Gregory now an angel who plays his harp on the strings of memory.
—Perie Longo

On “What He Must Have Seen” by Stephen Kampa:

I think this poem works on so many levels—the wonderful words: “gangles, totters, tremor-steps, orotund (which I had to look up), smarts-riddled crowd, the digital blink.” You can just see everything in it—and be thrilled for the victory of the old man, over all the condescending congregation and the too-sure pastor. The old man wins it all, crawling, but knowing he will rise again. The last three lines just blew my away—further each time I re-read it, now I must crawl, too, through my days , remembering and seeing what path I am on.
—Mary Ericksen

On “Man on Mad Anthony” by Bea Opengart:

Though each poem had its merits, Opengart used the long form, the thoughtful line breaks to speak with delight, curiosity, and compassion for the subject matter. I picked Opengart’s poem for its tone and its brilliant sustained pacing. Never was I bored or arguing the narrative. Always interested in the next line and in this line and believing the voice totally. Like it should, the poem let me see a new world in my old one.
—Daniela Buccilli

On “Laundry List” by Michelle Ornat:

Applause, applause for her smooth transitions. I didn’t read this poem; it pulled me through like I was water skiing down the Colorado River while having multiple orgasms move through me like the San Andreas when it’s on a roll.
—Pat Phillips West

On “Man on the Floor” by Jack Powers:

I like how the alternating indentations of the lines seem to mirror the poem’s own elliptical movements from one memory or idea to the next. The back and forth of the lines mimics the fits and starts of growing up. The thematic thread of regrets concerning manhood and fatherhood hold the parts together as the piece moves from one unexpected turn to the next. This poems reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford’s famous dictum that the best writing consists of “a succession of tiny … surprises.” That stat about forgetting 90% of your dreams in the first 10 minutes of awakening stuck in my head for weeks, long after I remembered where I had read it.
—William “Mike” Pulley

On “Basic Standards Test” by Danez Smith:

I love when a poet chooses an unusual premise to explore a common topic. I also love when a poem pummels me with sorrowful truths, expert use of language, and grace. This one made me feel guilty even though I haven’t done anything. Or maybe because I haven’t. It made me want to try to change circumstances over which I have no control.
—M

On “Who Breathed in Binders” by Patricia Smith:

A brilliant poem—a tapestry of universal themes, history, politics, economics, sexuality—all revealed through specific, heart-rending details of a bound young woman’s inevitable fate on the slave auction block. As the poem delivers the crushing vileness of the woman’s degradation, it does so in a rich and beautifully crafted work of art. Ironically the poem is deeply disturbing and at the same time a great pleasure to read. The poet’s sensibilities and voice are established and sustained with the literal, the metaphorical, and layered meanings of “binder.” There are “whole binders full of women,” followed by the repetitive “binder” sound and play on words—becoming a painful emotional chant. The artful, inner beauty of the poem is woven together with cruelty and brutality, “a black girl languished, her limbs linked by iron.” The musicality is both chilling and lulling. The weaving of rich poetic language continues with horrific images of base sexuality, woman as object, as property, for self-gratification, business, and profit. “Who Breathe in Binders,” is a poetic achievement—using virtually every poetic element to create powerful images in beautifully crafted language. The emotional depth holds a timeless record of years of inhumanity through the tortured experience of one “binder” woman. It is a stunning and hauntingly beautiful poem. And, yes, “strange we should forget.”
—Margaret Gratton

On “Of You” by Wendy Videlock:

For me this is a story within a story. It is a piece of memory, of peaceful acceptance. A way to say hello after a good-bye. It could be a mother to her child who has grown up, a wife or daughter dealing with a loss. Either way for me it is the bringing back of memories with the windowsill as a soft place to land and a strong hand to hold.
—Rose Firestone

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September 15, 2013

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Roberto Ascalon

“The Fire This Time”
by
Roberto Ascalon
Seattle, WA

__________

Finalists:

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”
Chanel Brenner
Santa Monica, CA

“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX

“Baby Love”
Courtney Kampa
New York, NY

“What He Must Have Seen”
Stephen Kampa
Daytona Beach, FL

“Man on Mad Anthony”
Bea Opengart
Cincinatti, OH

“Laundry List”
Michelle Ornat
Elma, NY

“Man on the Floor”
Jack Powers
Fairfield, CT

“Basic Standards Test”
Danez Smith
St. Paul, MN

“Who Breathed in Binders”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

“Of You”
Wendy Videlock
Grand Junction, CO

 

These eleven poems will be published in the Winter issue of Rattle this December. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2013 – February 15, 2014).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets will be notified individually about details, but they are: Jacqueline Berger, Daniel Bohnhorst, Jackleen Holton, Sharon Kessler-Farchi, Michael Meyerhofer, Kathleen Nolan, Charlotte Pence, Sam Sax, and Timothy Schirmer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 2,105 entries and well over 8,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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