Enduring Love

In three-line stanzas, the tale of a Chicano woman in Chicago struggling to make a life.

WATERCOLOR WOMEN/OPAQUE MEN

A Novel In Verse

By Ana Castillo

Curbstone. 269 pp. Paperback, $15

It's a bold or a foolish decision to write a novel in verse. Few enough people pick up novels; fewer still read poetry in any form. Combine the two, and you risk sacrificing the propulsive possibilities of narrative prose to the elliptical insights of verse. Who'd trade a robust narrative and well-fleshed-out characters for a handful of lyrical moments?

You don't really have to in Watercolor Women/Opaque Men , Ana Castillo's new novel in verse, although its hybrid literary form tries to contain more multitudes -- of characters, historical and mythological episodes and socio-political commentary -- than it has room for. Like Castillo's previous books, Peel My Love Like an Onion and So Far From God , this one centers on the lives and loves of Latino women -- in this case one woman, the archetypal Ella. She was born to Mexican workers who came to the United States for " la pizca " -- "the picking they did/season after season" in the growing fields that, for people like them, have also been killing fields.

Castillo writes feelingly of those who work themselves to death, the children like Ella forced to toil alongside their too-soon-old parents:

Forget

The sun that caused fevers,

blistered lips and feet,