Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?

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.