Poetic Fiction With a Tex-Mex Tilt : WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK; And Other Stories, <i> By Sandra Cisneros (Random House: $18; 176 pp.)</i>

From poetry to fiction and back doesn’t seem too long a stretch for some writers. Linda Hogan’s recently published “Mean Spirit” was a first novel, but the author’s reputation runs long and deep in the tiny community of North Americans who buy and read poetry. Louise Erdrich is well known for her novels, but once upon a time she was (and surely still is) a poet. Joining their ranks, Sandra Cisneros has added length and dialogue and a hint of plot to her poems and published them in a stunning collection called “Woman Hollering Creek.”

The 22 stories mostly range from short to very short (six paragraphs), with a handful that are longer. All are set along the Tex-Mex border where people listen to Flaco Jimenez on Radio K-SUAVE and light candles in church to ward off the landlord and mean ex-lovers. Their language gets in your ear and hangs on like a love powder from the Preciado Sisters’ Religious Articles Shop.

Nearly every sentence contains an explosive sensory image. A narrator says of her classmate, “A girl who wore rhinestone earrings and glitter high heels to school was destined for trouble that nobody--not God or correctional institutions--could mend.” A child runs off in “that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather.” Emiliano Zapata’s abandoned lover remembers: “It was the season of rain. Plum ... plum plum. All night I listened to that broken string of pearls, bead upon bead upon bead rolling across the waxy leaves of my heart.”

The subject of love, inseparable from babies, hope, poverty and escape, is everywhere in these characters’ talk and dreams. When an unfaithful husband kisses his lover, “It looked as if their bodies were ironing each other’s clothes.” A girl explains that love is like “a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it.” Her friend gives this account: “There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn’t talk, just walked around all day with this harmonica in his mouth. Didn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.

“This is how it is with me. Love I mean.”

In the face of all this fatal passion, though, women of grit keep fashioning surprising escapes out of radio lyrics and miracles. In the title story, a bride, whose knowledge of marriage comes from a Mexican soap opera, is taken by her new husband across the border to Texas, far from her family, where he beats her. The creek that runs past her house is called La Gritona --Woman Hollering Creek--and she’s fascinated because she has heard women wail but never actually shout, an act requiring anger or joy. In the story’s wonderful, non-soap-opera ending, she meets a woman who knows how to holler.

Another compelling heroine, in “ Bien Pretty,” is an educated Latina from San Francisco who’s spent her life trying to nail down her ethnic identity. She moves to San Antonio for a job, where she falls into a lonely evening routine of chips and beer for dinner, falling asleep on the couch, and waking up in the middle of the night with “hair crooked as a broom, face creased into a mean origami, clothes wrinkled as the citizens of bus stations.” She heads all her letters home with “Town of Dust and Despair,” until suddenly, disastrously, she falls in love with an exterminator from La Cucaracha Apachurrada who reminds her of an Aztec God. She loses her heart and learns what she can never be, but more important, discovers what she is.

My favorite in the collection is “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” a sampling of letters of petition or thanks pinned onto the altar of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Familia Arteaga thanks the Virgin in a businesslike manner for having saved them when their bus overturned near Robstown. Another note, more blunt, says, “Please send us clothes, furniture, shoes, dishes. We need anything that don’t eat.” Still another begins, “Can you please help me find a man who isn’t a pain in the nalgas . There aren’t any in Texas, I swear.”

It’s a funny, caustic portrait of a society in transition that still pins its hopes on saints. The last of the letters begins, “Virgencita . . . I’ve cut off my hair just like I promised I would and pinned my braid here by your statue.” This supplicant’s family believes she is selfish and crazy for wanting to be an artist instead of a mother. She pours out her heart to a Virgin who traces her lineage not only to Guadalupe and Bethlehem but also to wild, snake-charming Aztec goddesses. It’s a fine revelation of a cultural moment in which potent saints can hold a young woman back or send her on her way, depending on which traditions she opts to cherish.

“Woman Hollering Creek” is Cisneros’ second collection of stories (following “The House on Mango Street,” which Random House is reissuing), and I hope there will be more. It’s a practical thing for poets in the United States to turn to fiction. Elsewhere, poets have the cultural status of our rock stars and the income of our romance novelists. Here, a poet is something your mother probably didn’t want you to grow up to be. Even the most acclaimed could scarcely dine out twice a year, let alone make a living, on the sales of their poetry collections. Fiction has a vastly larger audience that’s hard not to covet.

So, if they’re going to do it, all poets would do well to follow the example of Sandra Cisneros, who takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language. When you read this book, don’t be fooled: It’s poetry. Enjoy it, revel in it. Just don’t tell your mother.