Wednesday May 13, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
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?
About the Author.
Donna Masini is the author of a novel and four poetry collections, most recently Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.
About the Moderator.
Marie Howe is the former poet laureate of New York. Her book New and Selected Poems won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.