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Decades of Rehearsal
Wayne Allen Jones
80 pp., 5 3/8" x 8 1/2",
perfect bound paperback
ISBN: 0-9722553-2-X

Wayne Allen Jones is subject to “en-too-ziasms” (Southside for not
knowing when to stop). This volume is the third in eighteen months.
Written in 1999 and 2000, these poems speak with a new voice –
bolder, more forceful, more energetic, more passionate. The risks
are manifold – in subject, point of view, tone, and length – the history
of a steel mill and its workers, the ritual of fathers giving guns to sons,
a dramatic monologue from a piece of the cross borne by Jesus,
a nine-part study on types of rope, and an even longer poem about
a misguided walkabout in the Arizona desert.

Shorter poems put breathing room between the longer ones, and
many speak to the theme of the first book, Stone Works – the way
people make sense of the world by imposing their own meanings
on what they perceive, what happens, and how they respond.

“Decades of Rehearsal is a lyrical book of wisdom. Wayne Jones
journeys through the theater of humanity – the blood, the steel,
the skin of it all – so we may find the stuff we are made of and become
active in the drama of our existence. He traverses the worlds of
page and stage, and his words are prayers because – aloud or
in silence – they help the soul transcend.”

– robert karimi, artistic director, the Guild Complex, Chicago

“Wayne Allen Jones has the expertise of someone who studied
English at Harvard, though his work is as fresh as someone
who studied poetry in the saloons of Chicago. . . . [He] grabs
hold of dangerous subjects and handles them as confidently
as a mason handling bricks.”

– C. J. Laity of ChicagoPoetry.com
 

Contents - Click the Part to see titles

• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
  • Finding a Voice
  • Steel
  • Rope
  • Giving Guns
  • The Burden of the Cross
• Part II
  • Canyon of the Wind
  • The Problem with Plain Rivers
  • Signal at the Crossing
  • A Comfortable Guitar
  • Show Time
• Part III
  • The Search for Picture Rock
• Part IV
  • Winter
  • Spring
  • Summer
  • Fall
• Part V
  • Finding the Devil's Fork
  • Whence the Darkness
  • Deer Flies
  • A Thin Line
  • Blazing a Trail

Author Profile

Born in Arizona, schooled near Detroit, Wayne Allen Jones
studied Biology and English at Harvard, preparing in earnest for
academic life with graduate studies at the University of Michigan
and Harvard. While in Ann Arbor, he won two Hopwood awards
for poems and essays. At Harvard he completed his Ph.D. with
a dissertation on Hawthorne in 1974.

After sticking to his nineteenth-century knitting at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, he taught poetry and gave several readings
at the University of Miami, including a pilot-bombardier duo with
James Dickey. Cut short by the tenure sickle, he moved back to
New England and got a day job writing for industry, winning two
writing awards and a spot in a user group hall of fame.

Throughout these business years, he continued to write poems,
often in airplanes, and recently turned to readings and publication
to try his work in the public furnace. He was selected as a juried poet
at the 2000, 2002, and 2003 Houston Poetry Fests, and at the Chicago
Poetry Fest 2003. He was also selected as the seventh and last Knight
of the Mystic Pen and Stone Works was reviewed on ChicagoPoetry.com.
Jones has read in Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Cambridge.

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Last modified: 09/30/07