Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?: Poems

by Donna Masini

Overview

“Whip-smart, darkly hilarious, and deeply serious, no writer sounds like Donna Masini.”—Marie Howe, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Formally inventive and conversational, the poems, prose poems, lyric essays, and “notebook entries” in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? explore our bewildering, increasingly fragmented lives. Unpredictable and unfailingly curious, Donna Masini—in her most compelling, wide-ranging book yet—moves from elegy and intimate address to exuberant performance and meditations on mortality and time. “Today I woke up hearing the urn is half full,” one poem begins. “Survival is improvisational,” another poem declares, succinctly capturing the unpredictability of our lives. This moving, irreverent, and surprisingly buoyant collection is alert to the ways in which we distract ourselves—erotic fantasy, binge-watching Netflix—and try to make meaning out of these distractions. For all their shifts of mind, for all the human noise, these are poems alive to mystery, to our unexpected moments of beauty, ultimately asking: Why love it all so intensely?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324124191
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/12/2026
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Donna Masini is the author of a novel and three poetry collections, most recently 4:30 Movie. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"Whip-smart, darkly hilarious, and deeply serious, no writer sounds like Donna Masini."— Marie Howe, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"These are the poems of a friend who sees so much, both the danger and the beauty, yet gently leads us by the hand out of the darkness . . . These feel like poems we need for these troubling times."— Nick Flynn, author of Low

"Masini's intellect and wit shine through. . . . In the end, Masini seems to be saying, despite all this, we can stop, tune into what is still ongoing, and let go of ego and heartache and confusion. We can open our hearts and eyes, and it's enough. I'm grateful for Donna Masini's ongoing project to help us all do just that."— Kim Addonizio, author of Exit Opera

"With stoic comedy, vulnerability, and the intelligence of a mind moving at lightning speed, Donna Masini's?Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For??is both elegy and celebration. Masini's perfectly timed sleight of hand has given us a collection that is buoyant, fast-paced, unpredictable, and deeply moving."— Catherine Barnett, author of Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

From the Publisher