May 12th, 2026 — Happy Pub Day to Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (W. W. Norton & Company), poems by Donna Masini (CRF 2011).
About the Book
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?
NYC Events
Donna will be in conversation with Marie Howe (CRF 2022) tomorrow, May 13th at POWERHOUSE Arena bookstore in DUMBO, Brooklyn to celebrate the release of Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?. Get tickets at powerhousearena.com.
Praise for the Book
Whip-smart, darkly hilarious, and deeply serious, no writer sounds like Donna Masini.—Marie Howe (CRF 2022)
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.’—The New York Times
Read An Excerpt
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.
Learn more and get your copy of the book at wwnorton.com.