Both The House on Mango Street and "Woman Hollering Creek" and Other Stories by Cisneros may seem to the hasty first-time reader to be casually, even loosely constructed, yet the careful reader suspects that nothing could be further from the truth. The poet W. B. Yeats writes, about writing: "A line may take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." The "stitching and unstitching" Yeats meant was the writing of poetry, the painstaking effort to make it look effortless. Cisneros' fiction may sometimes "seem a moment's thought," but she is a fooler. Like the best poetry, her work is both direct and ambiguous; it rings true on many levels. It challenges and continues to reward the serious reader.
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