Sundress Reads: Review of Karaoke at the End of the World

Sea ditties and punk-rock ragers. Bears and mayflies, fires and water. Computer coding and cyborg dreams. Xenomorphs and ghosts. And through it all, the empty orchestra of grief and longing. In Karaoke at the End of the World (Jackleg Press, 2026), Genevieve DeGuzman explores the speculative nature of loss in an astounding array of language and image that takes the inevitable “what-ifs” of mourning and spirals them outward into this world and imagined ones.

The collection is sectioned into tracks, like the musical tracks on a karaoke night, and each one serves up different tempos and tones whose cohesion lies in shared images and experiences. The sections not only function as references to the title, however; they also take us forward and backward in time and space, sending the reader off onto different tracks of a multi-verse created by grappling with the incomprehensible, specifically the loss of a mother in a world that is falling apart.

The relationship between daughter and mother is explored in many ways, using both the speculative and the natural to great advantage. In “The Xenomorph Learns to Swim” (one of the poems in the collection that references the xenomorphs of Alien), DeGuzman writes, “Given enough time, everything shifts back, / to fetal position. Back to that formation // we always knew, swimming inside our mothers. // Before we gulped air for the first time, / and learned that we could drown.” This longing for simplicity and an earlier innocence is also seen in “Small Bodies of Water:” “The moon is the mandala at the top. / As is the mother. When revealed on a clear night, // both can turn a daughter back to wilderness again, / a grown woman to mouthless vulpine girl.” But in “Burning Heart Emoji,” reality and practicality intrude, the short lives of cicadas and mayflies juxtaposed with our own fragile existence where we “hear the mayfly speak, / beating inside my scorched chest. Fire. / Heart on fire. My heart on fire.”

DeGuzman’s ability to render grief not only occurs through natural images, as in the poems above, but takes grief beyond the real world, making it sing completely new melodies. In six poems that are spread throughout the collection with titles that read like computer code, DeGuzman rehomes the stage of grief, personifying the grieving daughter as cyborg, the Mother as a mysterious figure, simultaneously creator/absence/caretaker. The second poem in the series— “config == Daughter_var1, loop”—begins with the words “When pink blooms choked the rivers, Mother decided” and it continues with the mother “coding” the daughter to survive a seemingly endless timeline, leaving the Daughter to determine a different destiny: “Fed never satiated. A Fibonacci-shaped longing so perfect / I reprogrammed it to track the time.” In the third poem, the Daughter sees the Mother only in dreams, sends messages that are not answered. In the fourth— “Daughter_var1 Can Still Dance When She Breaks,”—the Mother returns to perform a clean slate procedure: “Restart, erase / were commands / you dipped / like lures / in the coded pools / between my bones.” In the fifth, the Daughter begins to shut herself down, and in the last of the series, the Mother “leans down, touching my face, her hands / a green garland around my head” as the Daughter notices birds all around her, beseeches them to make “pretty plunder of my wires,” to take the last shimmering pieces of her to the sky. In this intensely moving and original sequence, DeGuzman has crawled inside the heart of every grieving person who has ever wanted to wipe the memories away, to be reprogrammed with a clean slate, to shut down and be taken by the earth, to remember what was beautiful.

With humor, pathos, inventive line breaks, and staggering insight, Karaoke at the End of the World walks the perfect line between practical fact and the surreal, between the black and white of “Nothing downs a bird as reliably as a clear surface ”(“Anxiety as a Bird in Need of a Wildlife Rehabber”) and the fantasy of “Familiar Ghost,” where “For months, my mother in the hospital, the ghost played outlaw, unpledged warrior facing off with me on a beach, our blades angled against the sun, water darkening the sand at our feet.” DeGuzman may take us to the end of the world, but she does it with great tenderness and imagination, gives the readers a karaoke night where all are welcome to sing and grieve together.

Karaoke at the End of the World is available from Jackleg Press

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of four poetry collections  from Sundress Publications, most recently Unrivered (2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Tahoma Lit Review and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area, curates and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, and is the co-editor/co-founder of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.