With just a handful of exceptions, the poetry of my late wife, Jennifer Cram Wright, has heretofore been unpublished. During her undergraduate years at Seattle Pacific University, a handful of her more formal pieces were published in the 1997 edition of Second Essence, the school's annual journal of the arts; but aside from that honor, and the occasional feedback she would receive on her blog from Mark Sommers and a dozen or so others, I remained Jenn's sole enthusiastic audience.
That, I predict, will change with the publication of this volume.
As I posted bits of our story on social media in the weeks preceding and following Jenn's passing at age 45, a great many people told me that I should write a book about Jenn's life; I have steadfastly declined. The best explanation is that Jenn's story is best told through her own words; and her own best words are those found in her poems and poetic prose.
Unlike in the work of many poets, what you will find here is Jenn herself. She adopts no personae or pretense, and the point of view is strictly her own. The feelings expressed are real, neither feigned nor imagined. Nor sanitized--Reader be warned.
"The Bible is a gritty book," says Steven James. "Very raw. Very real. It deals with people just like us, just as needy and screwed up as we are, encountering a God who would rather die than spend eternity without them."
This is the Bible that Jenn read--the Bible of Judges and Lamentations, of David's manic-depressive Psalms and Solomon's erotic Song. And Jenn loved what Mr. James articulated because she saw in God's Word what she found in her own life.
This may be the Jenn you never knew, but only heard stories about. You may not be accustomed to such grit, to such raw, confessional emotion. On the other hand, you may have served in the trenches with her during some of these years, and also know only too well of what she wrote.
In these poems, which Jenn penned between the ages of twelve and forty-three, you will find a troubling yet compelling and ultimately triumphant story of a human soul profoundly broken, longing desperately for healing and understanding, and in a glorious turn of grace finding Hope rewarded. In these poems you will find, frankly, the full Gospel: sin and depravity, the darkness of the soul, loneliness, the need for a savior, delivery from the tomb, and walking in new life. Jenn's is a distinctly Christian journey.
And in the end, I think you will see that Jenn finally felt understood--and understood herself, with great moral clarity.
"God is always the hero," Jenn wrote in her journal on May 24, 2015, "of victorious stories." This is her own best epitaph.
Find, then, in the mostly chronological presentation of these poems, the Hero ever-present in Jenn's story--even during her long walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And carry in your mind a vision of the Shepherd who found his precious lamb, and in whose loving and gentle arms Jenn now rests.
Greg Wright
Des Moines, Washington
January 29, 2018
