Left-handed Poems

An emotionally riveting collection that tells a powerful story of passion, loss, and transformation.
 
Left-handed unfolds in the manner of an intense, searching novella. At its center is a one-way dialogue with an elusive character who beguiles and torments but also inspires the unnamed narrator, who at midlife is telling the tale.
 
These poems—decisive, wrenching, exquisite—show an overpowering force, at once disruptive and creative, invading a settled existence. They take us from the streets of New York City to a house in the country, from the island of Naxos to the Roman Forum. They reach back to the sonnets of Shakespeare but find inspiration, too, in contemporary life. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.

Jonathan Galassi is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Morning Run and North Street. He has also published translations of the work of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he was poetry editor of The Paris Review and currently serves as Honorary Chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in New York City.