Kate Braverman, a brash and theatrically dramatic writer whose novels, short stories and poetry were dense with lush and spellbinding imagery, died on Oct. 12 at her home in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 70.

Her daughter, Gabrielle Goldstein , said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Outspoken and outrageous, Ms. Braverman brought a ferocious energy to books like “Lithium for Medea” (1979), with their focus on women on society’s margins.

“Ms. Braverman possesses a magical, incantatory voice and the ability to loft ordinary lives into the heightened world of myth,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review of “Palm Latitudes” (1988), a novel about three women in a Los Angeles barrio, including La Puta de la Luna, the most famous prostitute in the neighborhood.

“The night will be as all others, treacherous, studded with disguised traps and graves,” Ms. Braverman wrote of La Puta. “She will survive it. There will be gold and the danger of barter with strangers, foreigners with metallic mouths of invisible eaten coins and greed, with mouths that are miniature replicas of the city, voids, empty, less than mud or clay, which are fundamental.”