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 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.