Leslie Williams's first book, Success of the Seed Plants, won the 2010 Bellday Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Image, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, and many other journals. She has received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Other poems by Leslie Williams in Verse Daily:
January 2, 2008:   "Furlough" "On the nightstand the corpse of a pear..."

Books by Leslie Williams:

Other poems on the web by Leslie Williams:
"Friend Shift"
Two poems
"The Middle"
"Lineage"
"Proved by the Sparrow"
"Doing Death"
"Friend with Golden Muscat Grapes"
Two poems

About Even the Dark:

"This is a lovely book. Understated and beautiful poems with a lot of intelligence and stillness and honesty."
—Traci Brimhall

"Leslie Williams maps an uneasy distance to grace and the 'mainsail beauty' of life. 'I love the purple inside oyster shells,' one speaker admits, 'but haven't done a thing to help them.' This collection offers us toothsome poems, witty and supple in their imagery, as we approach revelation inch by inch."
—Sandra Beasley

"Leslie Williams's Even the Dark is about finding the human person in a sometimes dark and unforgiving world. The speaker in these lovely and finely wrought poems finds her sometimes spiritual and sometimes physical voice in some familiar situations: dealing with children, neighbors, strangers on planes, writers' suicides, children getting sick, going to the supermarket, arranging flowers. Through a range of interesting forms, and intricate syntaxes, the poems show Williams as a master of using the thinking mechanism of poetry as a possible way to peace."
—Sean Singer

"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