To read Genevieve DeGuzman’s Karaoke at the End of the World (JackLeg Press, 2026) is to undergo a crash course in marvels. Woven through this debut collection are complex relational intricacies between mothers and daughters, colorful multiverse alternatives, and glitches in the time-scape of grief and wonder. Because I had recently written A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart (LSU Press, 2026), my own book of poetry about motherhood and grief, I asked Genevieve to have a conversation about the ways in which our books intersect. Below we discuss the liminal space between absence and presence, using multiverses as a poetic device, and—in Genevieve’s words—“the speculative fever dream of grief.”
-Kate Gaskin
Kate Gaskin: Thank you for having this conversation with me, Genevieve. I found Karaoke at the End of the World to be so wonderfully in tune with both the animal and plant kingdoms, often in ways that make me think of similar moves I made with A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart.
Genevieve DeGuzman: You clearly find comfort and affirmation in nature. In many wondrous ways, the natural world becomes the language of your collection. Your poems often feel like field guides. In “Landscape with Mixed Flowers,” you list nearly twenty flowers and plants. What draws you to these litanies and prayerful enumerations? What does a focus on nature accomplish for you in the writing process?
KG: Like all poets, I have ways of paying obsessive attention to the world. I’ve always been interested in plants, and I find many of their names to be beautiful and evocative, so it’s fun to weave them into poems. Since I’ve become a mother, I’m more apt to slow down and attend to the world around me. When I wrote “Landscape with Mixed Flowers,” I was thinking about the walks I took immediately after the death of my daughter. She was born and then died in March, and I was living in Omaha, Nebraska at the time. The Midwest is so pretty during the springtime—kind of cold and wet and astringent but beautiful. I felt half-dead with grief, and one of the only things that helped was going on long walks through my neighborhood, so I noticed as everything started blooming. First the daffodils and tulips and star magnolias, and then the forsythia and lilacs. The whole suburban landscape was reborn, and that beauty and those walks helped me remember I was still alive.
I also included quite a bit of animal imagery throughout A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart, and I noticed so much of the same kind of imagery in Karaoke at the End of the World. Poems like “Secret Society of Dodos” and “Anxiety as a Bird in Need of a Wildlife Rehabber” include extinct animals, soaring birds, and bioluminescent ocean life. There’s a sweeping, epic quality to the way you weave animals throughout your book. I know that writing about nature and animals often felt soothing to me as I plumbed the depths of my grief. Did you feel the same, or does this kind of imagery function differently for you in your writing process?
GD: In the immediate aftermath of my mom’s death, everything around me felt either exaggerated and hyper-real, or else it became a great blur, leached of color and sound. To get grounded, I did find myself turning to nature for timeless symbolism and imagery. Yet nature that was immediately accessible to me—say outside my house or in a local or state park—didn’t quite soothe or comfort. The natural world is a reliable constant, but it was indifferent to me, I realized.
This made me want to plumb darker corners of the animal kingdom that represented alienation. I was drawn to the creatures that crawl out at night or exist in secret, in defiance of observation: the lichen etched deep, vampire squid, the bird stuck inside an airport terminal in “Anxiety as a Bird in Need of a Wildlife Rehabber”; or the jellyfish that stings you in “Karaoke at the End of the World.” I looked to animals that no longer exist or are on the brink—in “Secret Society of Dodos.” And of course, the Xenomorph creature was an inspiration. She makes an appearance in several poems with her ooze and beetle body—yet still looking for understanding and sympathy. The grieving speakers identified with these twisted forms of life on the page.
KG: As a fan of the Alien franchise, I was particularly thrilled to see the recurring Xenomorph! I love the idea of using twisted pop cultural iconography to depict complicated grief.
GD: I’m a big believer in the idea that grief on the page is not only about processing what’s been lost but also processing what’s left behind, the space between absence and presence. On one hand you’ve lost a daughter, on the other you have your sons. If you’re able to talk about it, how did you navigate that in the writing of your poems?
KG: The grief I feel for my daughter is a weird kind of grief. She barely even existed. Even the words I use to describe her—daughter or infant or baby—don’t feel quite right. She was born at 21 weeks, so before the point of viability, which generally starts at 24 weeks, but in the American medical system she’s considered a birth, not a late-term miscarriage. She was also born alive, so she was not a stillbirth. I always feel the need to apologize when I point out these facts, like is this too horrific to be talking about. I have trouble parsing how I feel about her birth and death in terms of grieving a person because I don’t think of her as fully a person, not really. I have no memories of her other than my pregnancy and the few minutes I spent with her after she was born. I have almost nothing of hers to remind me of the fact that she ever existed except a birth and death certificate, a tiny urn of ashes, and my memory of those terrible moments leading up to and after her birth. So, to answer your question, which you put so thoughtfully, I wrote the poems so that I would have something concrete and tangible to prove to myself that she existed.
As for my sons, they both have to navigate the loss of this baby too. My oldest son was profoundly affected by her death. He’ll always remember it. My youngest—he simply would not exist had she lived, which is a profundity he’ll have to negotiate one day too. This question is so good, I’d like to pose it to you as well. How did you contend with this “space between absence and presence” as you wrote your own poems about your mother?
GD: It’s such a major tension in our books, for sure! That liminal space is exactly where my collection lives. And what’s more liminal than the multiverse? The multiverse is where all possibilities can still and do exist. I think of the poems “Cosmonaut’s Lament for Her Mother” and “Cosmonaut’s Return Home,” where the speaker is adrift outside of time, a kind of emotional exile before being called back home. Time is both earthly and earthbound but also self-bound and imposed. For the bereaved, it’s a way to protect ourselves. But eventually we have to live in the After. With our mortal lives and a planet undergoing environmental devastation, the apocalypse is never that interesting anyway. The post-apocalypse is where the story really starts. Who am I now after my mother’s death? Who was she? In “Close Encounter at Dance Party in the Distant Future,” grief is reduced to an exhibit to be gawked at, far from any emotional urgency and yet still haunted by it. In “Even Then We Danced” and “Woman as Ouroboros,” the poems also reckon with what comes after. Sometimes it’s not great, but we make do. Life goes on; we dance, we survive.
I also tangle with the liminal in the way many of the poems in my collection were written while my mother was still alive, some poems even long before she got her cancer diagnosis. For example, “Secret Society of Dodos” was written around the time I turned 40 and I would have these funny, meandering conversations with my mom about getting older. “How to Fold A Paper Crane” and “Stars That Are Not Stars” were poems written around mother-daughter fights we had and about long, simmering arguments. What really blows my mind are the poems like “July on the Sonoma Coast, Six Months Before” (I changed the title after she died) that I’d written when she was just months away from passing and we were taking a family vacation together on the California coast. Reading those poems now suddenly makes them more powerful in their prescience, an example of anticipatory grief maybe, or something more? Later, in revising those poems, I struggled with how to preserve the moment—that feeling of her still being present—yet also wanting to show the current reality in which she’d already passed on.
KG: You do a fantastic job in all your poems, but especially “July on the Sonoma Coast, Six Months Before” of grounding readers’ attention in sense memory using details like “. . . gold-brushed headlands, / wet-nosed deer, juniper fire pits.” Images like these help us remain present with the speaker’s mother, even after her death.
GD: Thinking through the lens of my own collection, I found “Multiverse with Boybands and Roses” really striking and effective. I couldn’t write directly about my own grief in some sense, and I escaped to the multiverse and to the world of speculation. Why did you decide to veer into the multiverse in this way to imagine your daughter’s life (and perhaps re-imagine your own)?
KG: One of many things I enjoyed about reading your collection was discovering how our two very different books unexpectedly thematically converged. Karaoke at the End of the World opens with a multiverse poem: “In Every Universe, I Meet My Mother.” I think it’s so interesting that you say you invoked the multiverse in order to avoid writing directly about the grief of losing your mother. Your poems are so empathetically attuned to loss that it surprises me to hear you say that writing about your grief felt difficult. For my purposes, the multiverse was also an escape. I was writing all these heavily vulnerable poems about infant loss, and my manuscript just felt so dark, nearly melodramatically so. I knew I needed to observe my own grief from another angle, a playful angle even! And I also wanted to think about what it might have been like to have a daughter, which is something I’ll never know now. But I know what it was like to be a daughter, especially in the late ’90s of my own teenage self. That’s where the premise of the multiverse came into my head. Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Our Andromeda,” about a mother imagining an escape to a distant planet where her child’s devastating birth injury is healed, was also an inspiration. I love the imaginative wanderings in Shaughnessy’s poem and how they hold room for love, grief, anger, and wonder. Imaginative wanderings is also an apt description of Karaoke at the End of the World, with poems full of extinct animals, xenomorphs, cosmonauts, computers, and code. Tell me more about how some of these ideas came to be.
GD: The imaginative is where I naturally go as a writer. The collection’s tidewall of animals, xenomorphs, cosmonauts, computer code, and ghosts—don’t forget the ghosts!—is a representation of the speculative fever dream of grief that I wanted to capture. Since I was a child, I’ve been a big fan of science fiction and horror, so the imagery of the Xenomorph and cosmonauts, for example, is pulled from that long-time interest.
I love that you mentioned Shaughnessy’s “Our Andromeda.” The poem is a tour-de-force in its fantastical, speculative framework that transports the reader into another time, place, and possibility. Sometimes writing in a realist mode is too limiting for the love and terror one feels and wants to bring to the page. In writing Karaoke, I actually found myself reading a lot of speculative memoir and essay collections like The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin, My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta, and A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. To dig into complex personal stories, these texts use fantastical, fabulist elements, like talking to animals, reframing myths, and indulging in time travel back to our child selves. I’ve found the speculative a useful way to ruminate on grief outside the confines of conventionally shaped grieving. I often think this collection is for people who have grieved in strange ways.
KG: That’s such an interesting way to describe grief. I’ve found my grief to be so expansive that at times I’ve also felt made monstrous by it, so I appreciate how your collection creates this literal link between grief and strangeness. What a gift you’ve given others who are also feel made strange or monstrous by their grief.
GD: I’m not a mom and don’t have that shared experience with you. Nevertheless, I found myself thinking a lot about my own mother. Sadly, I never had a good sense of her personal and private experience. Your kids will have this collection—a testament that they can read. I’m curious if you thought about how they might interpret your account of being a mom and if that affected how you wrote poems, especially the difficult ones related to them.
KG: I’ve definitely thought a lot about how my children might receive these poems as they grow older, especially my oldest son whose sometimes-difficult childhood I’ve written about extensively. I made so many parenting mistakes before I understood his neurotype. He wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD or autism until he was six, and then those diagnoses came about because he was in such a crisis in kindergarten and at home. I’ll speak just for myself, but what I found is that when your child receives an autism diagnosis you’re suddenly plunged into a chaotic vortex of opinions about what to do next. Good, reliable services that aren’t abusive can be difficult to find. Navigating advocacy, care, and treatment can feel impossible, especially if your child is as emotionally dysregulated as mine was. It was an awful period in the life of our family. We had no idea what we were doing or how to help him. It took so much trial and error to learn how to be neuro-affirming for our particular child. It’s something we still work on daily, even now. I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. I’m sure I still make mistakes. My hope is that these poems will serve as a record of love and care—and also, somewhat, as an admission of fault.
It’s interesting that you say you never had a good sense of your mother’s private and personal experience. Maybe my kids will appreciate my poems one day because they offer that. One thought I constantly had as I read Karaoke at the End of the World was how much the daughter’s love for the mother is revealed in poem after poem. It was like witnessing the inverse of the poems I had written about my children. Your poems contain all this awe and love and longing reaching out into the world, through the vastness of the universe, toward someone who is no longer physically here. Will you share more about how you approached writing about your mother?
GD: Honestly, it was tricky navigating that. In Karaoke, I told myself I would approach writing about my mother and our relationship with objectivity and fairness but also be true to my feelings. My mother and I became somewhat estranged toward the end of her life over disagreements about her medical care and declining health, and I’ve always been haunted by that—how conversations were unfinished or unrealized. And of course, I can speak now about it, but she can’t respond.
It’s one reason I’m drawn to the multiverse and its speculative possibilities. In the multiverse, all possibilities are still on the table! Theoretical physics allows my mother to be alive in some iteration of reality. I felt I wanted to explore that, to articulate the beauty and sadness of that paradox, the compelling hypothesis of “what-ifs” I try to capture in the opening poem “In Every Version I Meet My Mother” for example, and also in the daughter subroutine poems and in “Notes from a Matrix Operator.” Ultimately, I like to think I wrote these poems to find my way back to my mother, to find a way back home for myself.
KG: And you are certainly successful in your intent. It’s so generous of you to create these speculative possibilities in Karaoke at the End of the World. It allows us as readers of your work to extend that same comfort to ourselves in our own grief.
***
Genevieve DeGuzman is a poet and writer with work in The Adroit Journal, Nimrod, phoebe, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and other publications. A Tin House Workshop alum and Alice James Award finalist, she has received the Oregon Literary Fellowship, the StoryBoard Fellowship from StoryStudio Chicago, as well as fellowships and support from AWP, Oregon Arts Commission, the Oregon Regional Arts & Culture Council, Poets & Writers, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in the Philippines and raised near San Diego, she attended Columbia University and formerly worked in finance and international development in New York and overseas. Genevieve now lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their unimpressed cat. Karaoke at the End of the World (JackLeg Press, 2026) is her first full-length collection.
