Solving for X: Wagner’s Tenth
J. Khan
Solving for X,by Maryfrances Wagner, Spartan Press, 2022.
Solving for X is by far Maryfrances Wagner’s most powerful writing. She writes in a direct Midwestern narrative style, often recounting her Italian family roots, as well as her love of animal and winged life. However, her most recent poems also examine her years as a teacher and the difficult lives she touched. I quizzed her about this a few months back, and we agreed that her poetry in Solving for X had both jumped to a new level and found a surprising new direction.
Wagner is always busy: writing poetry and co-editing the I-70 Review. She just served two years as Missouri’s poet laureate. As a past editor of New Letters Review of Books and recipient of the 2020 Missouri Arts Award, she shows no signs of slowing down. Readers will find that same remarkable and focused energy channeled into her eponymously titled tenth book Solving for X Wagner retains the signature wry humor and earnest delivery that have underpinned her decades of popularity and national presence. As well, she has added a level of hard-earned but confident perspicacity. In her poem “Cataract Surgery” she writes:
Over in seven minutes, we awake, wobbly, and step from the amber varnish of a dark
Rembrandt, into the new blue of a Hockney morning where seeing is believing in all of its bright white.
While Wagner’s new writing still draws from her love of art, animals, and family, she also illuminates some disturbing classroom experiences. Finding an appropriate voice and place from which to describe the plight of others is a sticky wicket for modern poets. Wagner begins with poems that reflect the patriarchal culture of her childhood, one where violence was actively countered.
When writing about her teaching years, Wagner employs composite student personalities and pseudonyms. She wisely stays within her persona as a high school teacher, describing her observations and reactions. We share in her discomfort as she carefully navigates racial boundaries, observes teen pregnancy and drug use, and listens as students reveal shameful secrets. As always, she does this with careful narration, a gentle heart, and unwavering but balanced perspective. Indeed, the “X” in Solving for X could as easily be the unsolvable social crisis of America’s increasingly marginalized economic underclasses. In “Disappearing” Wagner interleaves scenes from a dream with the lives of her students:
She stared into space. Her eyes were buried coins. She came to my desk to ask what to write about. Tell your story, I said.
I brought the baby back inside to feed it but its mouth was gone. A skinny stray roamed the backyard. Sniffed where the baby had lain
Wagner surprises, poem after poem. Her best longer poems rely on her empathetic instincts while developing narrative plots that allow her to weave individual scenes into a convincing emotional tapestry. These specific technical strengths, her lived
experiences, and composite student characters allow Wagner to venture into the hazardous emotional and social terrain of America’s at-risk teenagers: beset by predators, drugs, violence, poverty, structural inequities, and poor parenting. She returns unscathed with book in hand.
Wagner delivers. Readers of her tenth tome will be pleased by her seasoned writing. She is direct, engaging, and better than ever as she spans the full range of human emotion, explores the human condition, reveals the cruel exploitative world of disadvantaged youth, and compels the imagination to solve for X.