Diane Williams, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams ** 1/2

It is a testament to the influence of the Romantics that calling a writer "poetic" implies lyrical descriptions of nature. Diane Williams is poetic in ways that better reflect contemporary poetry: compression, disrupted syntax, oblique allusions, shifting point of view, alienation, best taken in small doses.

As with poetry, I wonder whether I read these very short stories too quickly or with insufficient attention.

I like Williams' titles, both for her books (Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear) and stories ("The Widow and the Hamburger"; "The Fullness of Life is From Something"). Her off-kilter sentence construction is often funny, and certain thematic concerns come through, but most of the stories fly over my head. Here's a paragraph selected from a random page (398, in the story "There are so many smart people walking around"):

When she started to eat me, I asked her if she was tired. She said yes. I told her to sleep. Then she cried. I brought her back to my beard to eat me. She started to cry. I told her to sleep. She started to cry. I asked her if she was tired. She said yes. I told her to sleep, except that I ate her until she started to cry again and she yelled.

Unusually for an experimental artist, the stories from her most recent collection, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine,  come closer to sense,  with fewer time and location jumps.

When introducing yourself to an avant-garde writer you are unfamiliar with, choose a work that has fewer than 764 pages.