Matters for You Alone

“Leslie Williams’s bright and supple poems of devotion navigate the rifts between human and divine, culture and nature, love and loss. A longing to be made new, to love with abandon, to see beauty in the dark—these are this poet’s imperatives. “More and more I feel / threaded by the divine in life,” Williams writes, “and what a fine needle it is.” The poems in Matters for You Alone—as delicate as they are forceful—honor the spirit and the mind of creation.”   —Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers

Boston Authors Club Spotlight

Featured in MER Bookshelf

Review by Heather King in Angelus

Poem and micro-review in Washington Review of Books (scroll down)

Purchase: Slant Books / Amazon / Bookshop.org

Even the Dark 

Winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition

Finalist, Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry

“The finely worked and astonishingly beautiful poems in Even the Dark are prayers and meditations that ask the most difficult questions about suffering—our own, and others’—without losing sight of the infinite richness to be found in small, daily moments. Williams’s deep thinking about the lives of women—their tending of others, their demons and despairs, their need to remember and reclaim autonomous selves—allows her to render both individual and collective realities. Immense sadness is counterbalanced by intensity of insight; raw loss is transformed by the poet’s spiritually attuned wisdom, worthy of absolute trust.” —Jennifer Barber

Featured in The Millions Year of Reading

Review by Heather King in Angelus

Purchase: SIU Press / Amazon / Local bookstore