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.
Notices
“[F]unny, and tragic and ironic and all shades in between…. wholly and spectacularly original. His seemingly chaotic spill of words is in fact marshalled out on the page with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel and it’s a joy to see. Highly recommended.”
—Anne Cunningham, in The Anglo-Celt
“Thomas Walton’s latest book is his most uncomfortable, and perhaps his best. Unsavory Thoughts compiles musings and meditations, by turns sarcastic and serious. With this genre-defying author, nothing is definitive except the reliable quality of his elegant, entertaining, and approachable prose…. Unsavory Thoughts is yet another step in the author’s journey to find harmony between the grotesque and the humorous while flirting with the deadpan, scholarly headspace of the literati. Walton, through his writing, continues to remind us that there is no other voice quite like his, no other philosophical perspective on writing quite like his, and we are all better off after reading the collection.”
—Greg Bem, in Rain Taxi, Winter 2025 (No. 120)
Thomas Walton is the author of Unsavory Thoughts (Sagging Meniscus, 2025), Good Morning Bone Crusher! (Spuyten Duyvil 2021), All the Useless Things Are Mine (Sagging Meniscus, 2020), The World Is All That Does Befall Us (Ravenna Press, 2019), and, with Elizabeth Cooperman, The Last Mosaic (Sagging Meniscus, 2018). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Delmar, Timberline Review, Rivet, Stringtown Magazine, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Bombay Gin, Pontoon, and other magazines. He is a contributing editor for Exacting Clam.