Description

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?