The Rattle Chapbook Prize operates as a distinct category within Rattle's submission ecosystem, judged by the magazine's editors under anonymized review. Three winners are selected, each receiving $5,000 and 500 author copies of their chapbook. Crucially, the winning chapbooks are also distributed to Rattle's more than 10,000 subscribers alongside issues of the magazine—placing the work not merely in a contest archive but in the hands of a committed readership. The entry fee of $30 is not a sunk cost but a one-year subscription to Rattle (or a one-year extension for current subscribers), a structure that aligns the contest with the magazine's ongoing readership rather than treating it as a pure gatekeeping mechanism. International entrants receive a three-quarter subscription (three mailings) due to shipping costs. At least one of the three winners will be a poet who has not yet professionally published a full-length book of poetry exceeding 48 pages at the time of submission—an explicit provision that keeps the prize porous to poets without a book-length track record. The editors' anonymized review signals that the evaluation is intended to rest on the manuscript itself rather than on biography or prior publication. For poets working in the chapbook form—whether as a discrete sequence, a thematic gathering, or a compact architecture of shorter lyrics—this is a rare instance where the form is the primary unit of recognition, and where the reward includes both a significant honorarium and a substantial print run distributed through a national subscription base.