Wed 10 Jan 2007
New at RATTLE.com
Posted by Tim under rattle rubbish
It occurs to me that I should make a post highlighting some of the new features we’ve started at www.rattle.com in the last year, since renovating the site. This might be a boring post to those who are already aware of these, but I think they’re still worth pointing out.
1) E-Reviews
This started as an online suppliment, a way to make use of the dozens of decent reviews we just didn’t have room to print, but has quickly muscled its way into the limelight, to the point where we’ve decided to discontinue print reviews altogether. By posting reviews online, we can publish an unlimited number of them, of unlimited length, on any book relating to poetry. They’re all in one place, so easy to browse, and links to the publishers make books easy to order. We’re happy to publish any reviews we’re sent (as long as they’re well-written and thoughtful), but we also have a long list of books available for review. Every review copy we receive will be listed there, and anyone can request a book — write a review and keep the book as payment. The process helps us be an active community and gets good books into the hands of readers, and all it costs us is postage.
2) E-Issues
This started out as a simple newsletter, in hopes of filling in the six long months between publication. But we kept adding more and more content, until the newsletter became a mini-issue of it’s own, downloadable for free as a pdf. E-Issues will release every March and September, and include book features, artwork, essays, reviews, and previews of forthcoming RATTLE issues. March’s e-issue will feature six poems each from Laurie Blauner’s All This Could Be Yours and Roy Jacobstein’s A Form of Optimism. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive an email update when each new issue is released.
The Rattle Poetry Prize offers an award of $5,000 for a single poem, making it one of the largest prizes of it’s kind, plus a full ten $100 honorable mentions. The entry fee is just a one-year subscription to RATTLE, at the regular rate of $16, and this year we’re accepting submissions online as well as by mail. Our goal is just to increase our subscription base, and break even, which we were able to do with great success last year. I can’t think of a more entrant-friendly contest — if I could, we’d have copied them.
I don’t want this post to sound like a big ad, so I’ll keep this short — buy any five back-issues at a discounted rate, and receive a free one-year subscription. That means 7 issues total, around 1,400 pages of poetry, etc, for just $25. While supplies last and all that.
This summer we’re releasing a special issue to celebrate the 21st birthday of slam poetry. In addition to the usual 65 or so regular poems, the issue will feature a full-length audio CD of slam poems performed, plus essays, and interviews with slam founder Marc Smith, and four-time champion Patricia Smith. If you’ve been dismissing slam — hell, I know I have — you’ve been making a big mistake; there are exciting things happening on stage. This issue will be the perfect introduction. And for the slam veterans out there, it will be a great compilation of slam’s best performers. To preorder a copy by credit card, click here.
