An intimate, poetic and surprisingly funny reckoning with life after loss
\"To say I have a memory like a sieve would be an insult to sieves. I have a memory like a basketball filled with glue. I have a memory like a plastic croissant on a windowsill that someone is pointing to and saying, it looks so real.\"
In this exquisite, darkly comic debut, we meet a poet looking around at a life he can’t remember how to live. Surrounded by books, he now finds reading unbearable; stories no longer make sense. He has renounced the internet, elevators, television. He is convinced he is dying. He walks wrong-footed and map-less through Italy, Iowa and Iceland, his sense of time collapsed.
The End unravels into a deeply personal double eulogy: for books, and the good life they promised, but also for the author’s mother – a former librarian – whose death has overwritten his world with unanswered questions. How do we tell the story of a loved one’s life if they have chosen to end it? And how can we make sense of our own, derailed by mourning?
As the days break and the poet reckons with these two losses, he slowly finds new ways to inhabit a world grief has toppled, rediscovering mystery and gratitude – both for what was, and what remains.
Luke Allan is a poet, editor, and typographer. He is the author of Sweet Dreams, the Sea and a book of lyrical non-fiction titled The End. His poetry and non-fiction are published in the TLS, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, the Literary Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, and have received the Ivan Juritz Prize, the Westerly Life Writing Prize, the Mairtín Crawford Award, and the Charles Causley Prize. Allan is editor-in-chief of Oxford Poetry and poetry editor at Partus Press. Previously he edited poetry for Carcanet Press and PN Review and co-founded the magazines Pain and Butcher’s Dog. He has a Master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford and an mfa in book arts from the University of Iowa, and is currently a phd student at the University of Cambridge, researching poetry and typography. He designs books as Studio Lamont.
Luke Allan is a poet and typographer. He is editor-in-chief of Oxford Poetry, and author of Sweet Dreams, the Sea (Poetry Society of America). For his poetry and non-fiction he has received the Charles Causely Prize, the Ivan Juritz Prize, the AAWP/Westerly Life Writing Prize, and the Mairtín Crawford Award. His work is published in The Paris Review, Poetry, and the TLS.
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