Leslie Williams is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Matters for You Alone (Slant Books, 2024). Her book Even the Dark (SIU Press, 2019), won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and was the finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Award. Leslie's work has appeared in Liberties, Image, America, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Honors include the Bellday Prize, the Robert Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Individual Artist Grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Massachusetts.

Other poems by Leslie Williams in Verse Daily:
December 25, 2020:   "When I Was Alone" "When I was alone..."
January 2, 2008:   "Furlough" "On the nightstand the corpse of a pear..."

Other poems on the web by Leslie Williams:
Two poems
"Batter my heart"
"In Me as the Swans"
"Land-and-sea"
"The Speck in Her Eye"

Leslie Williams's Website.

About Matters for You Alone:

"Was it Allen Grossman who wrote that a poem is about something as a cat is about the house? In the opening poem, 'Moonstone, Tiger's Eye,' Williams writes: 'I would creep closer. I would be less / about things and more inside them.' Throughout this God-haunted collection, Williams moves, chatoyant, among the flora and fauna of this world, whose primal secrets, if she attends closely, might bring her closer to knowing the ineffable 'friend' (her own true self?), a friend whom her heart, over time, so prodigally and ardently seeks and cherishes, forgives, survives, and transforms."
—Lisa Russ Spaar

"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

"Leslie Williams writes in a rare and holy register, both wry and absolutely wonderstruck. These are poems that tell the whole truth about our world, a world of cracked lobsters, green diamonds, gangs of turkeys, broken doorknobs, shrinks for children, bleeders in ambulances, and ankle bells on Atonement Day. All this, held by that jolly, howling, uncanny God whom all psalmists know, and whom our good psalmists (like Leslie) are learning to love. Read this."
—Paul Pastor