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.

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