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Maryfrances Wagner's Backstories might be called a short story collection in verse. Individually, these unforgettable poems pack the power of the best short fiction, and as a whole they tell the story of so many of today's American high school classrooms, the keen intelligence nestled in the most disadvantaged students, the circumstances that cause students to prefer detention so they might have a quiet place to do homework rather than the family motel room of 6 siblings, or so they might find a place to sleep between before-and-after-school jobs. Wagner's students' backstories include a teenage mother dropping out to care for an unplanned daughter, a bullied student beaten unconscious in the bathroom, another gaining attention by driving his prom date and himself to a fast and fiery death. And all the time in the background if not the front of the classroom is the patient yet demanding teacher with the strength of character to ask for the best from each student, fielding the questions: Why do we have to study grammar? We already know//how to speak and understand each other...We never stop learning in here do we?//Is it too late to drop this class? Although the individual backstories are drawn with a fiction writer's gifts for character development, setting, etc., the writer is also a poet who can speak of young blue jays with more stomach than wing, and A dozen trapped backstories//fly[ing] from an attic trunk//like moths//finished with wool. Who can ask, [W]hat would you do in my situation? This is a book of courage.
