Roar of All Septembers

poems by

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice

ISBN:  978-1-964277-94-3, 40 pages, $13 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: June/July 2026

An Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $18/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems and reviews published in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, the NCTE’s English Journal, MER, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Lodged in the Belly (Main Street Rag, 2024), bears witness to her mother’s adoption story and documents her own experience as a queer parent. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown University and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives with her wife in Florida. Learn more at jhdracostice.com/.

In Roar of All Septembers, Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice draws on her experience as an educator to weave poetry of witness and place. Confronting urgent collective crises such as political violence, the global pandemic, and school violence alongside personal reckoning and the intimate struggles students face, these rich, profound poems are ultimately an homage to teachers and prayer for the youth. “Did I teach her well?” the poet asks tenderly, “Does her song lift despite me?” ~Andrea Jurjević, author of Small Crimes and In Another Country

In Roar of All Septembers, Dracos-Tice allows us into the terrorizing and tender obligations of a teacher in 2020s America. Despite lurking threats, these poems beg that we attend the students who enter our lives like husk cherries “gone deeper into the green”, that we remember our former selves—“young bodies, / beads tossing hair pumping”, and that we compose a last will for placing our stories on the shelf with others we have loved.  ~Jesse Breite, English Department Chair and Author of For The Ones Who Died Young and The Knife Collector

Only a teacher could offer such lucid visions of the pandemic era. Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice finds a kind of solace in the masked smiles of her former students, in the piles of backpacks gathered during shooting drills. The elegies and image-rich meditations in Roar of All Septembers do what poetry does best: offer our fractured memories a chance to dream again, nurtured by this poet like seeds “gone deeper into the green.” ~Mario Chard

Back-to-School Pep Rally

Musical chairs—pep rally fun—
sounds mellifluous but is so
nasty. One origin was a German game—
“Trip to Jerusalem”— not enough
room on boats for Jews trying
to emigrate. 800 students and teachers
watch the competition on the gym floor build
as chairs disappear, kids fight to fit
two sets of hips between
seat arms, flurry,
fight, and backward tip—
struggle, arm jam,
kid caught under
the scrum, all of us
standing and screaming,
school photographer twisting, training
his long lens on the last one
alone in his chair.
We pound the bleachers,
he pumps his fist,
we laugh and shout his name.

Visitor

The space below your lip is pierced,
a gold tip above your thick brown beard.

I don’t remember your name, summon
Matthew? Jeff? Perhaps neither, but I know

that poem you wrote for class years ago,
of spires, a climb, bright lights, and I wondered

had you trespassed, but you insisted then
it was metaphor, not what I know now.

Today, you sit, ask if you can spit poetry.
Your eyes close, your head tilts back

against the whiteboard, hair smudging
class notes to a purple streak. You start,

riff and run, she had loved me once
but now is gone, your moustache waving
with each spilled line—

Another? Yes, sing me another, your name
catching in my throat.

Getting Rid of the Books

My wife bundles our grown kids’ sets in Saran Wrap—
A Wrinkle in Time, Eragon, Anne of Green Gables—
to keep each book with its family. She bunches
paper in box crevices, so odd-sized texts won’t slide,
pulp pages won’t fold under hardback weight. I stay

in the passenger seat when we reach Good Will,
look ahead at matching suede sofas, two bedside lamps
by a dumpster for the unsalvageable.
An employee wheels out a canvas container
after we tell him the boxes packed
in the trunk like a Tetris mosaic
are full of books. Wait

my wife calls—and I see her
in the side mirror scramble
to help him as he opens each box,
lifts above his head and lets
the contents tumble and strike
at broken angles in a deep bin
meant for dirty laundry.

When my wife slides
into the driver’s seat,
receipt in hand,
she is weeping. I want

to write about book banning, books
I can no longer teach, books pulled
by administration mid-read, but
I’m a high school English teacher still
drawing a salary. Coward,

I will write a last will
and testament for my books.
Not a designation of who
gets what, but how
to gently pack them, how
to place them

atop the stack next to a girl,
feet against the heat vent,
book propped open,
spine resting on her lap.