Stone Works - Poems

Stone Works is author/publisher Wayne Allen Jones's first book of poetry. The three parts explore the ways people try to give meaning to their lives by imposing, arbitrarily, a structure on their experience that has more to do with their needs and less to do with the neutral reality of experience. The first part sets forth the process; the second shows the result when the process seems to work well; and the third and longer part shows the emptiness and disappointment when it becomes clear that experience moves without reference for a person's need for meaning.

Wayne Allen Jones moved from an early competence in science through an undistinguished transition at Harvard to the study of literature in graduate school at the University of Michigan and a Harvard. He taught at UIC in Chicago and UM in Miami before being denied tenure. He subsequent two decades in the computer industry took him through a variety of jobs (writing manuals, writing code, managing performance testing and the business of 64-bit migration and system management software. This background prepared him for the shift from writer to publisher. Stone Works (2002) was his first project. Three years and twenty-six projects later, he has become known in Chicago as the hardest working publisher in the city.