"We are all homeless women, crash victims, chance survivors," Kate Braverman announces in her lush, atmospheric collection of short fiction, Small Craft Warnings. Or, put another way, "Sometimes women must go traveling." The disassociated protagonists of these stories are travelers of a psychic if not a physical sort, homeless women by nature if not in fact. Living through the long, bright California of the soul, they find themselves seduced by the possibilities of simply walking away. An aging soap-opera star struggles to cope with her brain-damaged mother in "Our Lady of 43 Sorrows"; the teenager of "Hour of the Fathers" chafes at her visits to her newfound father, a disabled, mentally ill Vietnam vet. Oddly passive, these women dream of escape, not action. Even when the young homeless mother in "Pagan Night" plans to abandon her baby, it"s as if she were reading about something that had already happened. Braverman"s prose is something of an acquired taste. An accomplished poet, she writes in highly rhythmic and figurative language, in metaphors that shimmy from concrete to abstract and back again in a way that can be disorienting, even claustrophobic. Why use one noun when three in a series will do? Mesh; aviaries; the odors of citrus and vanilla; porcelain teacups; candles, perfume, and blood: these are the incantations in Braverman"s curious fictional spell. "Sin becomes a kind of flame, a blue friend warm in your hand," proclaims the grandmother in the title story, and if this sort of dialogue strikes you as contrived rather than lyrical, Small Craft Warnings may not be for you. For the less literal-minded, Braverman rewards the reader"s attention with linguistic pyrotechnics that read like no one else writing fiction today. --Mary Park