Kass Fleisher
Accidental Species: A Reproduction
ISBN 0-925904-49-X
Fiction/Innovative Prose
$16
110 pages

Reviews

In Kass Fleisher’s wild and wonderful universe, “the traffic was horrible and lots of people were late with their periods,” or again, the poet busies herself trying to “express debt on a sly chart meant to show asset retribution.” If there is a “question of the day” for her young couples, who “naturally” refuse to share their food, it’s “who ate the oreos? who drank the tab?” The reader, turning the brilliant and hilarious pages of Accidental Species, hardly has time to come up for air before s/he is taken on yet another verbal space shuttle, engaged in language games at once preposterous and yet deadly in their accuracy. If you want to know what it’s like to navigate the shoals of intellectual-life-on-a-shoestring, as it plays out today across mediated America, Accidental Species is the book you cannot afford to miss.

—Marjorie Perloff

Exploring (exploding) language to uncover gender’s syntax and undo the sentencing of women to specific (and limited) roles in the compelling narratives of marriage and family, Accidental Species is tough-minded, brilliant, gorgeously written, completely original, and extraordinarily freeing. “say a poem when you can’t breathe,” one of its many multilayered, contradictory voices advises — and this is the poem “[...this is not poetry]” to say: Fleisher’s words loosen all false stays against confusion to allow a transformative laughter “[knot poet tree]” which opens the hope chest “[nota bene]”!
“N.b.: These words are not chains binding you to any one specific construct of hardwood forests.” (32)
With Accidental Species, Fleisher’s mother wit and creative fury give us a “novelpoem . . . — or is it poememoir,” undoing knots (and nots) to loosen breathing room in all our lives.”
— Laura Mullen

Imagine an evolution where each generation sets up an expectation for the next, which in turn satisfies in ways that couldn’t be expected, and you’ll get some sense Kass Fleisher’s Accidental Species. At the level of the sentence, it evokes the prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein; at the level of the story it is a chimera of the personal and the public, past and present-a defamiliarization of the pathways of mind men and women, mothers and daughters, trod so leadenly, wondering why the other is such a strange animal. At the level of the book, Accidental Species is a stunning achievement, a constantly surprising collection that word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, story-by-story generates a picture of what we are by exposing the grammars we live and unwittingly reproduce.

— Steve Tomasula