"Ardor"
by Roy Jacobstein
The Threepenny Review
Fall 2005

Roy Jacobstein:

Since his 1997 2nd place debut in The Washington Post’s “Worst Poetry Contest,” Roy Jacobstein has published more than 100 poems in many literary journals, including The Gettysburg Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly. His poems have been Runner-up for the Marlboro Review and Indiana Review Poetry Prizes, received Prairie Schooner’s Reader’s Choice Award, and won Mid-American Review’s James Wright Prize. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass just selected one poem as Runner-up for The Iowa Review’s 2005 Poetry Award and another poem has been selected for inclusion in the textbook LITERATURE: Reading Fiction, Poetry & Drama. (McGraw-Hill, 2006).

Roy Jacobstein has been an inner-city pediatrician, worked in Indo-Chinese refugee camps, served as a high-level official of the United States Agency for International Development, and been a consultant to Save the Children, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization. He is currently the Clinical Director of EngenderHealth, a non-governmental organization based in New York City that provides assistance to developing countries in Africa and Asia in women’s reproductive health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS. He has also driven a laundry truck, worked on an automobile assembly line, appeared on Jeopardy, and adopted a Cambodian infant on September 12, 2001. Many of these subjects are addressed in his poetry collection, A Form of Optimism, which takes its title from this saying of Roberto Rossellini:

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

Today’s featured poem from The Threepenny Review also appears in A Form of Optimism, which was a Finalist for the 2005 Dorset Prize at Tupelo Press. Another book of poetry, If They Don’t Have Ritalin in Heaven, was a Finalist for the 2005 Larry Levis Prize at Four Way Books. Neither of these books has yet found a publisher. His latest chapbook, Tourniquet, is newly out from Hollyridge Press. His previous book, Ripe (University of Wisconsin Press), a Finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, won the 2002 Felix Pollak Prize.

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