cover image Learning to Dance and Other Stories

Learning to Dance and Other Stories

Sharon O. Warner. New Rivers Press, $9.95 (170pp) ISBN 978-0-89823-132-8

Carol, the young undergraduate in ``Birds''--a story in Warner's first collection--takes a matron's job at an institution for profoundly retarded girls. She meets Beth, a patient whose self-abusive practices include gouging herself with her fingernails and beating her head against walls. Carol alone discerns in Beth ``the grace of an athlete or dancer.'' During a series of unauthorized field trips, Carol discovers that the direction of Beth's fierce energies shift from self-multilation to an innocent wildness--a fearless letting-go that Carol has suppressed in herself. Here as elsewhere in these stories, women who are strangers to one another become co-conspirators in escape from a multitude of prisons: institutions, marriages and personal fears. Most poignant is ``A Simple Matter of Hunger,'' detailing a young mother's struggle to care for her adopted infant--nearly a stranger--dying of AIDS. Warner renders with genuine pathos the woman's realization that the child, like birds in a field startled by human intrusion, will ultimately be ``just out of my reach.'' In ``Happiness Tricks'' and ``Under the Bright Sky,'' however, Warner's leisurely pacing undermines her stories' impact. (Feb.)