FSG's Jonathan Galassi Profiled at The New York Times

Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, gets a lot of room in this weekend's New York Times; he's just published a book of poems entitled Left-Handed. The poems, however, have a very direct narrative to them and are "about me," Galassi says. "He added: 'I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.'" The NYT sums the book up as "the story of a married, middle-aged man who backs into being gay." More:

The first part of the book, “A Clean Slate,” is about middle-aged feelings of regret, longing and a sense of impending mortality. “I want spring to come because/I want upheaval, flooding/the excitement of the primal rite,” the speaker says in one poem, and then adds: “And I don’t want spring to come/because it means another, one less spring.”

In another poem he asks: “Who remembers/Delayed Gratification?/Save it for later,/for a rainy day.” This part of the book ends with a heartrending poem called “Ours,” a farewell to the speaker’s wife and daughters and the life they shared:

the girls the life I left the
lost life all of it was ours is
ours was ours is ours was

“The Crossing,” the second section of “Left-handed,” consists in part of urgent, sometimes despairing love poems written to a figure called Jude. In the final section, “I Can Sleep Later,” he has apparently been replaced by someone named Tom, who is likened to Antinous, the young man beloved by the Roman emperor Hadrian, and the book ends with the speaker somewhat at loose ends: a nomad, a loner and a fool for love.

Though happy to talk about himself and his book, Mr. Galassi, 62, was reluctant to discuss the other figures in it. . . .

Those figures, the profile notes, include Gawker celeb and Tao Lin agent Bill Cleg, "whose own book, 'Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,' a memoir of alcohol, meth and crack addiction, came out in 2010."

That he and Mr. Galassi might have been involved heated up the literary gossip wires in the summer of 2007, not so much because someone’s coming out of the closet was still news but because of Mr. Clegg’s bad-boy reputation, and because Mr. Galassi is the straightest of straight arrows.

Mr. Galassi said that Tom was not a publishing figure — his relationships after Mr. Clegg have been of less interest to the gossip sites — and that he currently isn’t involved with anyone in particular.

Mr. Galassi is not a night owl or a swashbuckler. He’s an old-fashioned publisher, the kind with the habits and temperament of a scholar and the wardrobe of a banker. He took over the helm of Farrar, Straus from Roger Straus, a company founder and his mentor. He may be the last person in publishing to have worn a suit and tie to work every day, and lately, having given up the tie, he still looks like a prep school English teacher.

“Jon is a true man of letters, or maybe these days we should say person of letters,” said Scott Turow, whose best-selling thriller “Presumed Innocent” was one of Mr. Galassi’s early acquisitions at Farrar, Straus.