This book comes at readers from all angles, literally, with its energetic mix of innovative narrative, informed cultural criticism, and good old-fashioned character development about life among the drinking classes. Hansen's absolutely contemporary questioning of individual identity spins out through a story about some ordinary and ornery people whose mundane lives are paradoxically compelling and often shocking. The characters are always thinking even if they don't think they are, and the result is a novel in which boredom, pain, humor, and the unexpected swoop through the rubble of what everybody seems most sure about. In a way that keeps readers guessing right to the final word, ....and Beefheart saved Craig shows how philosophy and getting through the day are much more tangled up than so-called common sense often suggests.

—Mark Wallace

 

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Jefferson Hansen is a graduate of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo, where he worked with Robert Creeley and Charles Bernstein. He is the author of a number of chapbooks of poetry and prose. A collection of poetry chapbooks, entitled JAZZ FORMS (Blue Lion), is due out this year. Jeff lives in Minneapolis with his children Cece and Molly, his wife Elizabeth Burns, a novelist, and his dog Victor.