Cruelty

In Jefferson Hansen’s collection of short stories, Cruelty, his assorted strange and confused characters are much like the people who pass through my life any day, only with a more pronounced and interesting strangeness. He has re-defined human complexity in a playful way and made it less disturbing—and more disturbing. A poetic fantasy of words and science ply their way through these short stories containing multiple duets of conversation as to why we exist and what we are. The intellectual nimbleness displayed in Hansen’s short stories is not unlike what is told in old allegories and folk and fairy tales. —Mary Kasimor has been published in many online and print journals, including Otoliths, Altered Scale, Moria, Yew Journal, Big Bridge, Certain Circuits, Cannot Exist, among others. She as several books and chapbooks published: silk string arias (BlazeVox Books), & cruel red (Otoliths), Duplex (Altered Scale) and The Windows Hallucinate (LRL Textile Series). Jefferson Hansen’s Cruelty provokes a mixture of thought-feelings…At one turn, these prose-poem f[r]ictions feel like Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, then like sci-fi wildman Philip K. Dick’s vast active living intelligence system. Hansen seems to have replaced Arendt’s “banality of evil” with the “banality of cruelty,” a switch feeling more aesthetic than moral in light of the extremely thoughtful, textured yet funny—at times hilarious—occurrences inside, outside and tangential to the Superpower...that degenerate setter of transgressed limits. I laughed out loud…feeling myself simultaneously tickled and gutted. You will too. —Chuck Richardson, author of Smoke and Does the Moon Ever Shine in Heaven?