This is Not a Drill, by Jenny Morelli

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This Is Not A Drill is a collection of poems that shed light on the nuances of what it means to be a teacher, along with the doubts and struggles we experience, the things no one likes to talk about, including suicide, saving someone with two words, school shootings, and sometimes being a school mom for those without.

The poems in this collection range from narrative to lyrical to all-out explosive with themes that include identity, doubt, depression, suicide ideation, and hours-long lockdowns that begin with ‘This is not a drill’ and end with ‘Nothing was found.’

I’d love for these poems to shed light on hard stuff teachers go through, but also how tough experiences draw us closer to our students and make us better teachers.

I hope my readers walk away with a new perspective of what being a teacher really is, that essence that cannot be quantified, but is immensely more rewarding than any grades and state scores will ever be.

Jenny Morelli is a high school English teacher from New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and two cats. She’s inspired by everything she sees and experiences and finds that weaving her emotions into words is the best and strongest way to connect with others on the most human level possible. She’s a prolific reader and writer of poems, memoirs, short stories, and novels, but poetry is her first passion; poetry and her students.