SOURCE: Hudzik, Robert. Review of The Chinese Insomniacs, by Josephine Jacobsen. Library Journal 106, no. 17 (1 October 1981): 1930.

In the following review, Hudzik lauds Jacobsen's The Chinese Insomniacs, deeming the volume “richly musical.”

Jacobsen's first collection since The Shade-Seller (LJ [Library Journal] 4/15/74), a National Book Award nominee [The Chinese Insomniacs], is a richly musical volume composed of both rhymed and free verse. The quiet tone at the center of these poems derives from a spare, meditative style. In the title poem, a private “sorrow, or not” distracts two Chinese poets, living 900 years apart, from sleep; a “companionable” unrest reaches across the centuries to haunt Jacobsen, and render time meaningless. Gestures, dreams, tears, flowers, spiders are the silent objects of Jacobsen's art. Like the child's game “Simon Says,” her art, by necessity, attempts to “distinguish” between the authentic and the merely imitative.