Even the Dark

Reviews / Votes

"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, author of Count the Waves and I Was the Jukebox

"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, author of Honey & Smoke

"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, author of Works on Paper