Unsavory Thoughts
By Thomas Walton
These linked essays of personal and cultural critique include meditations on home and childhood, love and sex, art and literature, parenting and self-destruction, on the city and on death. Walton constantly slips through and between memory’s tenuous folds: “that never happened, exactly, but it’s certainly not a lie.” Witty, candid, defying category, dogma, and expectation, Unsavory Thoughts is a bold self-portrait in an inscrutable landscape: lyric, profound, tragic, hilarious, absurd, insightful, teasing, searing, sincere. This is the world we live in—real or otherwise.
Thomas Walton is author of the anti-lyric-essay lyric essay The World Is All That Does Befall Us (Ravenna Press, 2018) and the micro-chapbook A Name Is Just A Mane (Rinky Dink, 2016). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Delmar, Timberline Review, Rivet, The Chaos Journal, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Bombay Gin, Pontoon, and other magazines. Some of his poems were anthologized in Make It True; Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015). He lives in Seattle, where he edits PageBoy Magazine.