Donna Masini

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?

In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fuelled by despair and humour, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with “its engine of extras”. Masini's exquisite wordplay shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful, foreshortened run.

In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fueled by despair and humor, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with “its engine of extras.” Masini's exquisite wordplay shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful, foreshortened run.

"Think about sex," this book begins, then moves through the places into which our longings lead us. Here are confessions whispered over the phone in "Phone Sex," sins recounted to priests, "pretend confessions" told to a sister. Here are poems about a mother teaching a daughter to read, a girl trying to read her mother, a woman trying to read lovers, and marriage, and herself.

"I have been stalking my husband's lover." So begins the irrepressible and edgy Terry Spera in this unsettling tour de force about the nature of obsession. About Yvonne propels us into a startling and erotic journey. We watch as Terry begins to follow Yvonne through the streets of Manhattan, to her apartment on the Upper West Side, and as she begins to make even more alarming inroads into Yvonne's life. As she tries to maintain a semblance of normal life with her husband, Mark, a Soho art dealer, we, like Terry, veer from certainty to uncertainty. Is Mark having an affair? With a breathless energy and a deeply engaging voice, Donna Masini illuminates the dim and fragmented terrain of an inner life, the vagaries of sexual lives, the difficulty of cultivating a spiritual balance in a city of distractions.