Rain and Other Fictions

Introducing his five stories and a one-act play, Kenny ( The Mama Poems ) says that writing these kinds of narrative is ``an exercise in ridding poetry of the statement of prose.'' Regrettably, this disappointing collection suggests that the exercise also strips his tales of poetry, the element that may have lifted them above the mediocre. In ``And Leave The Driving to Us,'' a teenager rides a bus from Denverstet no state to San Jose, Calif., in search of the father he has never encountered. ``Wet Moccasins'' describes a man who refuses to take his wife hunting, returns empty-handed that evening, yet still has fresh rabbit--the one his wife shot in the backyard--for dinner; he eats it, one assumes, with a side dish of crow. A group of Pueblo Indians dances to bring an end to the dry spell, but the cultural and religious event yields tourists and vendors as well as ``Rain.'' In the one-act play set in a shabby hotel room, two men who met in the El Paso bus station decide to become ``Buddies,'' but the hotel clerk breaks up their friendship when he sics the police on them. (June)