Pop-up: Genevieve DeGuzman

About this event

Genevieve DeGuzman reads from her new poetry collection Karaoke at the End of the World at Portland Art Museum in the Nine Women Artist exhibition (Level 2, Room 207), paired with Shu-Su Wang, Triptych: Snack Attack / By Air… / Supercal…

Followed by book signing at The Shop at PAM.

About Karaoke at the End of the World :

When grief feels like a tender apocalypse, you don’t just cry, you sing at the top of your lungs.

In the book’s speculative wanderings into alternate pasts and imagined futures, grief turns into “shape shifting,” where revelatory confrontations and reckonings around family, body, and time take place. The speakers are extinct, ancient, alien, animal, robot, hanging out in outposts in the multiverse; at a dance party in the distant future; at a surfer bar in the Philippines; in a pastel pink pool in Palm Springs; in a neon-lit desert noir. Sections of the book are organized like tracks on a concept album. Readers pinwheel through alternate timelines accompanied by galactic dirges and space opera riffs. The collection offers readers a new language of bereavement filled with music and questions: A mother tells her child: The world is always ending, so look at the world—what is left of it. A child asks her mother: what’s the difference between a memory and a ghost?

From Genevieve DeGuzman