The End
Description
A lyrical, life-affirming meditation on books, grief, and the anchoring force of language
When Luke Allan’s mother dies by suicide without leaving a note, language falters. Reading, once a sustaining pleasure, becomes intolerable. Grief renders absurd what was once a way to connect to the world.
What emerges from these twinned absences is less a search for the right words than a recalibrated way of attending to the language and silences that shape a life. In The End, Allan’s inability to read becomes not a failure to find meaning in books but a turning toward what they describe: the world and the people in it.
More details
Person
Luke Allan is a poet, editor, and typographer. He is the author of Sweet Dreams, the Sea (Poetry Society of America, 2025). His poetry and nonfiction are published in the TLS, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, and The White Review.