Farrar, Straus, & Giroux is a very recognizable brand name behind countless prestigious literary titles. If you have a bookshelf at home filled with critically acclaimed poetry and fiction, it’s more than likely you’ve got several books with the FSG logo on the spine. The President and Publisher of FSG is Jonathan Galassi. He’s a poet and renowned translator of Eugenio Montale and Giacamo Leopardi. His new book of poems, Left-Handed, was recently released, and it, as Charles McGrath of the New York Times put it, tells “the story of a married, middle-aged man who backs into being gay,” a middle-aged man who also happens to have been married for thirty-six years under the appearance of being “the straightest of straight arrows,” wrote McGrath.

Of the book, Galassi has said, “It’s about me. I’m not hiding behind a persona. I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself.”

Galassi is thought of as an old-fashioned publisher. McGrath wrote that he may well be “the last person in publishing to have worn a suit and tie to work every day…and he looks like a prep school English teacher.”

One of the authors Galassi publishes, Michael Cunningham, said, “He’s one of the last survivors of what we think of as the old school of editors. He actually edits. You can send him a messy, half-finished manuscript and he’ll read it and talk to you about it. You know that he’s actually thinking about your book.”

Here are a few lines from Left-Handed:

…our real poems are already in us
 and all we can do is dig.
We can work for years and never find them
 or miss them when they stare us in the face.

Read the full story in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/...galassi-unveiling-the-heart-in-poems.../