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Forthcoming Chapbook (Dec, 2025):
For the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize, we received over 2,500 entries, including some of the best manuscripts we’ve ever seen, but the series only allows for three winners, and we’ve chosen the following three. Each of the winning poets will receive $5,000, and their chapbooks will be distributed to all 9,000 of our print subscribers, beginning with the Fall 2025 issue of Rattle. Per the guidelines, one of the winners is a poet who had not yet published a full-length book of poetry. 

Liz Robbins’ fourth collection, Night Swimming, won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest. Her third, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond; her second, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her first is Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (U Nebraska).

FREAKED

FREAKED by Liz Robbins is one of the winners of the 14th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Contest judge, Bruce Bond, had this to say about it: "Where there are freaks, there are those who freak. It is the signature of a contemporary world, its fractured inheritance of values and myths, where freak becomes a verb and thus weds the anomaly to her distrust of others and, worse, of self. Chance too can feel like fate, the scattered stars as the authors of character, angelic orders that give us orders, but what we find in this book's opening sequence, "Star-Holder," is, like stars, both held and full of fire. Bitterness, dread, drunkenness and disappointment-they find acceptance in imagination's constellations, in the poem's yearning for connection and yet, as freaked, for an independent refuge. Thus we find the poem as conversation, as something that reaches out, acknowledges, challenges, recalls, however pitched at the speed of individual reverie. Where better to begin a book than with a thrill ride, and the age when it dawns on us that fear and desire are like that couple you knew in high school, at odds constantly, but fabled, fabulous, crazy in love."

Night Swimming

Book (2023)

Liz Robbins writes poetry that critics have called smart, savvy, dangerous, and unpredictable. Appalachian State University’s literary journal Cold Mountain Review has chosen her newest collection, Night Swimming, as the recipient of its first annual poetry prize.

Liz Robbins lives in St. Augustine, Florida. She will give a reading at the Schaeffer Center For The Performing Arts in Boone on Thursday at 6 p.m. The reading is part of App State's Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writer's Series.

PLAY BUTTON

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Patricia Smith. "Liz Robbins's poems are smart, savvy, dangerous, and as bold as the big hoop earrings her characters are fond of wearing. Robbins does not shy away from the provocative or mischievously formal. By turns elegiac and political, poppy and poignant, PLAY BUTTON reconciles the good girl with the bad girl in us all."—Denise Duhamel

Fire Carousel

Chapbook (2023)

This book is as glorious as it is necessary. The poems and photographs in Fire Carousel resonate with the searing truth of what it’s like to struggle, often on a daily basis, to hold onto the hope we all have, the hope that we can have a happy life. I found the poems of Virginia Chase Sutton, Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins, and Lauren Tivey haunting, beautiful and genuine. Theirs are significant voices speaking to us from the darkness. Nikole Tucker’s photographs enhance the reading experience with their stunning images. ~Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Hope, as the World Is a Scorpion Fish

Liz Robbins's poems have what only the very best poems have: a sturdy toughness undergirding their tenderness. Though the body spins dervishly-almost blindly- for love and beauty, it must also accept the jolts of pain, of physical labor. As with the flowering pear trees in "On the Verge of Spring," we are ever " hopeful,/ hopeless--with [the] smell of sweat suggestive/ of work and of fear." There's a refreshing honesty in these poems as well as a tremendous amount of skill with a sensuous musical language. Each poem is a delight, something to savor. -Nance Van Winckel