The first time I encountered David Wright was in person, fall 2002, at the "Mennonite/s Writing" conference in Goshen, Indiana. As various writers struggled to negotiate their Mennonite identity, often framing it in terms of an inescapable past, Wright provided a blast of relief, jumping up on stage and saying that he was a Mennonite "by choice," reminding us that, indeed, such a thing is possible. (Another conference participant later referred to poet Yorifumi Yaguchi as an "unlikely Mennonite," which made me wonder if there should be any other kind.) In Lines from the Provinces, his first book of poetry, Wright demonstrates the same kind of energy he did that day on stage, the same motion forward, but never untouched by an ironic sense of exile. These are, after all, lines from the provinces, and Wright occupies many—that of the new Mennonite, the son mourning the death of his father, the commuter in strange company, the would-be poet, learning from a difficult master—always looking for "our real world/ Beyond your territories" ("Lines from the Provinces," 83).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes that, in poems, "genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission" (Biographia Literaria, chapter four). Wright visits many scriptural and liturgical places in this collection, always making the familiar strange, allowing the possibility of a fresh reading. In "Chicken Scratches on the Back of Sunday's Bulletin," he revisits Luke 13: 34, in which Christ longs to gather us "as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings." Wright takes the line seriously, looking unblinkingly at that chicken-God: "Not the strutting, crowing rooster, but the scratching, laying, shitting/ mother of a happenstance, misbred brood." He nonetheless submits himself to the image, asking "Clutch us under your mottled wings" (11). In these provinces, God himself is a traveler: "What kind of disappointing/ God arrives like an infant, anointing/ its slight body with dust and afterbirth?" ("Bethlehem Sonnets," 13).

Wright challenges the reader, but consistently from a position of humility—he is another on the journey. In "A New Mennonite Replies to Julia Kasdorf," he sings the song of the convert, protesting the stability of Mennonite identity and its apparently stabilizing markers: "As best I can tell, most of our quilts here were inherited . . . . Not much borscht,/ few shoofly pies at potlucks—instead it's/ humus, free range chicken, carob brownies." At the same time, he acknowledges and even celebrates those with whom he also contends: "We park ourselves in pews/ next to women and men who know better/ what real Mennonites are, at least/ have usually been, who tolerate us/ when we do not know (or want to) the so/ many stories we should" (17).

Wright takes us into the close places of his life, but only it seems, after having learned not to elevate "private grievance into highest horrific display" ("Lesson in Confessional Poetry," 43). We become witness to the woman spitting sunflower seeds on the train, the changing of the aging grandfather's piss-soaked sheets, the dream-like visit with a dead father, folding laundry though he never did in life. Coming along with Wright, though, you don't realize complicity until it is too late; he asks for nothing except your companionship, which is also the most one can ask.

By the way, don't be too put off by this book being self-published: Wright has earned his claim to an audience by publishing nearly half of these poems in journals; his next book, A Liturgy for Stones, will be published by Cascadia in spring 2003.

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