Physically grounded in the American South and Southwest, the 
poems in Are We There Yet? chart the poet's psychic and 
spiritual journey through the regions of youth and maturity, faith and 
uncertainty, innocence and experience, and past and present, 
reflecting the contrarieties of time and its incompleteness. These 
lyrics depict an unfolding emotional dialectica—a struggle, where 
moments and events are held up and analyzed for clues about how 
we stand firm amid the velocity of circumstance and experience.

"Roger Jones maps his journey toward home—'someone coming in, 
someone leaving'—a palimpsest of plenitude, long run down a 
blacktop road, wife keeping the pace, son and daughter easing ahead, 
father and mother, grandparents dropping behind, waving their future 
on, raised hands conferring a blessing, this family held by a faith, for 
now, sufficient."—Robert A. Fink


From "Contrary"

She darkened where she went, and now her blood,
too, storms my veins, and I see how I've spent too many
days like this, fuming and blustering about
too little: money, time or energy. Nothing
won't task our reservoir of complaint.
Even the mildest day invites reproach.

_________________________________________________________

ROGER JONES teaches in the MFA creative writing program at 
Texas State University. He is author of two previous collections, and 
his work has appeared regularly over the past thirty years in various 
journals, including Iowa Review, Southern Poetry Review, Hawaii 
Review, Texas Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Modern Haiku, and 
many others. He is married, with two children, and lives in San 
Marcos, Texas.