on Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
“Whip-smart, darkly hilarious, and deeply serious, no writer sounds like Donna Masini.”
—Marie Howe, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“With stoic comedy, vulnerability, and the intelligence of a mind moving at lightning speed, Donna Masini’s Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? is both elegy and celebration. Masini’s perfectly timed sleight of hand has given us a collection that is buoyant, fast-paced, unpredictable, and deeply moving.”
—Catherine Barnett, author of Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space
“I love the way the poems in Donna Masini’s Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? track the subtle shifts of consciousness as she navigates this perplexing world. To me it seems Masini straddles two horses in these beautiful poems—one we could name Disaster and one, Delight. Her subjects couldn’t be more weighty—mortality, time—yet her tone is one of bemused anxiety in the face of all she sees. These are poems of a friend who sees both the danger and the beauty yet gently leads us out of the darkness. I read this book in one sitting, then started it again. These feel like poems we need for these troubling times.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Low
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on 4:30 Movie
“The wisdom on display here, and the formal rigor married to a lilting lightness of touch, feel truly inspired–moreover, they reveal a generosity and a clarity of vision rare in contemporary poetry… 4:30 Movie is a stunning, playful, searing, healing collection that will enlarge the reader and revive something crucial in American poetry.” Tracy K. Smith
“These poems are extraordinary—electric with anxiety, smart, witty, constantly turning on themselves. . . I love this book.”
Marie Howe
“The speaker in this driven, headlong collection confronts the terrifying progress of her sister’s illness and watches her own mind perform the thousand jittery dances it does to ward off the unthinkable. Re-imagining her poems from the ground up, Masini emerges with a voice pressurized and anxious, a music tuned by an ear listening every second for the next alarm. 4:30 Movie is wrenching, full of smarts and nerve, and Donna Masini’s best book yet.” Mark Doty
“The poems in this new volume are not only Masini’s most formally adventurous and inventive, they are also her most compelling. . . There is a new gravitas in these poems, which, when combined with her formal intelligence, makes the poetry quite dazzling.” Lynn Emanuel
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on Turning to Fiction
Every page of Donna Masini’s new book bears the unmistakable signature of character: here she is, all of a piece, a vital and sexy speaker, wry and tender, wounded and indomitable, her body mind and heart held in the big, indifferent embrace of the only city that could be hers. These poems are pure New York, which is simply a way of saying they’re fully human, alive as the avenue. Mark Doty
Donna Masini is a strong poet of desire and longing, a confessional poet, yes, but with a priest on the other side of the screen. Above all she is a virtuoso conductor of the orchestra of the broken heart. Billy Collins
This is a book of body and soul—the profane reading the sacred, the sacred scolding the profane. These witty, dark, accomplished poems make a rare space for both and draw the reader into the adventure. Eavan Boland
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on That Kind of Danger
Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitably her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time. Adrienne Rich
Here is she: American, urban, beleaguered, transcendent, and brilliant. A fabulous new American poet bursting into our ears and our eyes with torrential clarity and intelligence, lust, and, yes, poetic genius. Long may she sing and may she sing all over all of us. June Jordan
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