SOURCE: Deen, Rosemary. “Josephine Jacobsen, Archeologist of Metaphor.” 13th Moon 10, nos. 1-2 (1992): 151-57.

In the following essay, Deen highlights Jacobsen's use of insomnia as a metaphor for consciousness, death, and darkness.

Josephine Jacobsen is a serious, witty poet in a classic/contemporary line of lyric truth. Born a year after Auden, her first collection of poems came out in 1940. In 1987, marking her 47th year as a public poet, she brought out her seventh book of poems, The Sisters. She has two collections of short stories and two volumes of drama study. She's been vice-president of the Poetry Society of America, Library of Congress Poetry Consultant, reader for NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], honored by arts and letters institutes. Under the usual fate of poets, only her last two books of poems (The Chinese Insomniacs and The Sisters) are in print. She is well known to the American...