Description

Rattle Poetry Prize

Conversation with
James Pennebaker

The Winter 2021 issue features our 11 Rattle Poetry Prize winners, including the 1st prize poem, “Encephalon” by Ann Giard-Chase. The open section features the usual wide-ranging poems with humor and heart. Melissa Balmain leads the issue of with light verse looking at her own brain (literally). Other poems cover love, evolution, Robin Hood, and the DMV.

The conversation section takes an unusual turn, where psychologist James Pennebaker discusses his lifetime of research on the benefits of expressive writing. Decades ago, Pennebaker discovered that writing about traumatic experiences yields strong and measurable health benefits. His more recent research has explores the way our unconscious use of function words can reveal our psychological secrets. Though not a poet, both of these topics are very much related to contemporary poetry.

	Open Poetry
	Melissa Balmain	On Looking at an MRI Cross-Section
	Roberta Beary	Six Haiku
	George Bilgere	The Call of the Fox
	Madeline Cash	Sponge Cake
	Margarita Cruz	Erasur
	Alan Fox	My Father’s Shoes
	Nancy Miller Gomez	How Are We Doing?
		Still
	Tom C. Hunley	If You’ve Met One Austic Person …
	Jennifer Juneau	For the Girl Crying on the Steps
	Jasmine Ledesma	Cataclysm
	Susan L. Lipson	Sharing Wounds While Card Shopping
	William Logan	Private Road
	Rachel Mallalieu	19th Nervous Breakdown
	Dave Nielsen	Come Back
	Whitney Olson	Jehovah Whitney
	Leticia Priebe Rocha	I Hate IKEA
	Alexis Rotella	Another Pandemic Dream
	Kerry Rutherford	Salad Shrimp
	Miracle Thornton	In the Kitchen
	Chrys Tobey	Love Poem
	William Trowbridge	Robin Fool and His Disconsolate Men
	Maryfrances Wagner	Brandon Langford Talk Through Detention
	Poetry Prize Winner
	Ann Giard-Chase	Encephalon
	Finalists
	Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose	After My Teenager Tries to Kill Herself …
	Heather Bell	This Is How I Make My Money
	Susan Browne	Do You Have Children?
	Rayon Lennon	Follow Me
	Dayna Hodge Lynch	Black Boys as Fireflies
	Mary Meadows	White Privilege Skydives with Black Guy in Appalachia …
	Erin Murphy	The Internet of Things
	L. Renée	Exodus: Gilliam Coal Camp, West Virginia, 1949
	Zella Rivas	Purgatorio
	Richard Westheimer	My Father Transformed by Dying
	Conversation
	James Pennebaker (web)
	Cover Art
	Kelly McQuain (web)