Roy Jacobstein 's first book of poetry, Ripe, won the Felix Pollak Prize. His award-winning poetry appears in many literary journals and is included in LITERATURE: Reading Fiction, Poetry & Drama (McGraw-Hill, zoo6). A physician working in international public health, he lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

About A Form of Optimism:

"As a poet and a doctor engaged in international public health, Roy Jacobstein observes the world from a singularly inportant vantage. He dwells not on the obvious if complicated politics of the virus but instead on the details that skitter away from the temptation of propaganda."
—Lucia Perillo

"If poets were athletes, Roy Jacobstein’s specialty would be the triple jump, that graceful, hysterical combination of running and leaping that can take a competitor fifty feet or more. Look at a poem like ‘The Mystery and Melancholy of the Street,’ for example, in which he sails all the way from Pago Pago to Argentina to Billie Holiday to Benjamin Franklin in just a few lines. And when the intern treating his busted cl;avicle says “hoops,” he thinks of the little girl in Giorgio di Chirico’s famous painting, rolling her hoop into the ominous shade. And out again: not in the painting, but in Jacobstein’s mind, so agile and richly imaginative that his every glance amounts, as the title of this collection says, to a form of optimism."
—David Kirby

"From a calligraphy shop in Istanbul to advertisements for caskets and toothpaste in Lilongwe, to a bottle cap of Faygo Red Pop, 'carbonated taste of the Midwest.' Roy Jacobstein's curious, unflinching eyes see more than most of us ever could. He reveals the blinding complexity of a world that encompasses both Hitler's watercolors and 'the gold glinting from an armadillo's shell.' Jacobstein's poems are as exquisitely crafted as a mosaic in Topkapi, and like Rilke's, they say to us in a voice we can trust, 'You must change your life.' Courageous and sensual, these poems 'claw deep into hard ground.'"
—Robert Thomas