Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
By Donna Masini
W.W. Norton & Co.
In Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?, Donna Masini moves through the world like a mix of Kafka and Mary Tyler Moore. Caught in late-capitalist mazes (nursing homes, the DMV, an insurance webinar, the pain relief aisle at CVS), Masini projects both frustration and joyful acceptance. Fittingly, her two most common topics are eldercare and Buddhism.
I had high hopes for Masini’s volume, which not only has considerable buzz behind it, but also sports the endorsement of Nick Flynn and Kim Addonizio on its back cover. If two of my favorite living poets liked it, surely I would, too. In the end … I wasn’t led astray. Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? is an exhilarating volume, ably mixing the everyday and the philosophical.
In addition to the collection’s eponymous poem, Masini has a series of poems that take a rote question and answer it thoughtfully. Other examples include “Are You Still Working On That” and my personal favorite, “Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?,” which begins like this:
Can you help me find a medication for my mother’s dementia and dress shoes that don’t hurt my feet?
Will you go to Trader Joe’s and pick up the red onions I forgot and remind me to bring my cloth bag next time?
Can you tell me why so much of the plastic we cycle is dumped into landfills?
I would like to understand how a credit-card-sized mosaic of microplastic ends up in our bodies every day—is this true?--and why I spent half an hour this morning playing a 37-second clip of Sylvia Plath laughing.
Throughout the collection, Masini maintains this mix of plain language, concrete nouns, and absurdity. In this way, the poems remind me of Chelsey Minnis. (This is high praise, as Minnis’s 2018 volume Baby, I Don’t Care is easily in my all-time top five.)
I was particularly moved by Masini’s poems about her parents. Her elderly father has died and, as one fatherless daughter to another, Masini captures the odd feeling of carrying on everyday life while also carrying the great boulder that is grief. Consider this stanza in “To the Woman in Window 8 at the DMV”:
When your father dies, I hope you’ll be with him, peering into his fogging oxygen mask. I held my father’s arm, thanked him for everything I hadn’t thanked him for as I stomped around in my glowering adolescence.
There’s so much in this one stanza. At first, it reads like a curse—How terrifying to see your father’s last gasps behind an oxygen mask! It seems vindictive, the kind of abuse a DMV employee likely receives on the daily. But then there’s a shift into a frightful sort of empathy. It’s a precious gift, to have the chance to sit by someone’s deathbed and say all the things you never had the courage to say before.
But a deathbed conversation requires death. The death of a parent, no matter how sudden or slow, leaves the heart in agony.
Masini dabbles in Buddhism with the well-intentioned but anxious manner common to the East Coast White, whose uptight psyche sees letting go as an existential threat. (I say this as an East Coast White myself.) I adored the all-too-relatable opening of “Kyoto 1,” which riffs on the famous Basho haiku:
I’ve never been to Kyoto, but I’ve stood by a lake in the Adirondacks so afraid I’d forget the blue call of the loon that I dropped my phone in the water as I tried to record it.
I am rarely where I am.
This imperfect but well-intentioned way of moving through the world comes through in Masini’s attitude toward travel, as well. I find much writing about travel is too idealized, too prone to falling into an Eat, Pray, Love fantasy of self-actualization, as if moving through space neatly correlated to enlightenment. Masini’s refusal to play into this myth of “finding yourself abroad” makes her journeys much more interesting than some Under The Tuscan Sun knock-off. In “Postcard,” Masini gives her own take on Italy:
Though it looks like a dusty flat-screen TV
I want you to see the way this Venetian sky
effaces the famous 150 canals and fades
into morning…
By focusing on the Venetian sky’s ordinary color and how it overpowers the famous canals, Masini reminds us that European cities aren’t cathedrals where we colonials must repent the sin that is our uncultured nature. Instead, they have an energy of their own.
Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? is a tremendous volume, chock-full of wit and humor. I had a blast reading it, and I highly recommend picking it up. It made me feel just a little less crazy to read Masini’s work and imagine her (an inveterate New Yorker) stomping down Houston Street determined to find something like peace in this world gone mad.
