Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
Poems
12 May 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
Deeply witty, attuned to the quotidian, these are necessary poems alive to the awareness of our mortality.
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.
These poems are rooted in the everyday: the supermarket line, dentist’s office, DMV, or pain relief aisle. Here erupt sudden spiritual questions: What are we without memory? Are clams happy? What is happiness? 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?
From “In Cahoots”
Our mother knew a lot of people in Cahoots.
We wanted to go there. Look at us,
my sister and I screeched, pulling
brown bags over our dull faces,
we’re in Cahoots! Upside down
in our spoons, a collusion of roots,
we looked into the future—
which looked a lot like Cahoots.
Reviews
"The indignities and absurdities of modern life ground this buoyant collection, Masini’s fourth, which includes poems set at the D.M.V., the grocery store and the pain relief aisle at CVS, alongside loving tributes to a dead sister and, throughout, a mother sinking into dementia. Masini has a light touch even when handling dark material, and takes contagious delight in riffing on figures of speech: 'This morning,' she begins one poem, 'I woke up hearing a voice saying the urn is half full.'
"
— New York Times
"Whip-smart, darkly hilarious, and deeply serious, no writer sounds like Donna Masini." — Marie Howe, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"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
"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
Standalone Ebook
9781324124207
COMING SOON