MATTERS FOR YOU ALONE: POEMS THAT EXPLORE FRIENDSHIP

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Leslie Williams is an award-winning Massachusetts poet whose collections include “Success of the Seed Plants” (Bellday Books Inc., $14) and “Even the Dark” (Southern Illinois University Press, $18). 

Her latest, “Matters For You Alone” (Slant Books, $17), consists in “a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames — and its absolute necessity.”

The title derives from the Jean-Pierre de Caussade 18th-century classic “Abandonment to Divine Providence,” and the poems are shot through with the search and longing for God, for connection, for the desire to love and to be loved.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

LESLIE WILLIAMS
photo: Kim Daley