For Jonathan Galassi, Unveiling the Heart in Poems "I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and author of "Left-handed," a new collection of poems. JONATHAN GALASSI likes to say that he has "backed into" most of the things he has wound up doing in life. If that's the case, he has reversed himself into some pretty nice spots. He is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy and an acclaimed translator of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. In New York publishing circles he is greatly admired for running a publishing house that is both commercially viable and a home for Nobel Prize winners and books of high literary quality. Mr. Galassi is also a poet, and his new book, "Left-handed," will be released by Alfred A. Knopf in March. If you read it carefully enough, "Left-handed" has a plot of sorts, the same one that propels the recent movie "Beginners," and is an important subtext of Chad Harbach's best-selling novel "The Art of Fielding." "Left-handed" is the story of a married, middle-aged man who backs into being gay. "It's about me," Mr. Galassi said last month over lunch at the Union Square Cafe, where he presides almost daily at a corner table. I'm not hiding behind a persona. The story is the change in the speaker - in his mind. In a way nothing happens, and yet everything happens. He added: "I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out. 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 In the final section, "I Can Sleep Later," he has apparently been replaced by someone named Tom, who is likened to Antinous, the young man beloved by the Roman emperor Hadrian, and the book ends with the speaker somewhat at loose ends: a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, beyond acknowledging that he was married to Susan Grace Galassi, a curator at the Frick, for 36 years and that they have two grown daughters, ages 26 and 30. His separation was "extremely painful," he said, and he and his wife got divorced only at the end of last year. Ms. Grace Galassi declined to be interviewed. In 2005, he added by way of explanation, he found himself, like the speaker in the poems, falling in love with a younger man. This wasn't the first time it had happened. Both in preparatory school and in college, he said, he formed strong attachments to certain classmates, but they were "unhappy and unactualized." "And then I had a happy relationship with Susan," he went on, "and it seemed like that was the way it was supposed to be." The attachment to the Jude character wasn't actualized, either. His affections were "unrequited," Mr. Galassi said, but the experience taught him that "he needed to love men." "All of a sudden I felt, "This is how I'm supposed to feel," " he said. Susan and I spent years trying to figure it out and trying to work it out together, and at the end I felt I had no choice. Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it. I feel like myself now, and I'm happier. It's had no effect on my professional life whatsoever. Nobody cares. In the end, Gawker always moves on to the next story. To publishing insiders, Jude's identity is no mystery: he's Bill Clegg, a literary agent whose own book, "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man," a memoir of alcohol, meth and crack addiction, came out in 2010. Mr. Clegg, who is also said to be the inspiration for "Keep the Lights On," a movie by his former boyfriend, Ira Sachs, declined to be interviewed about his connection to Mr. Galassi's book. 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.