The World Is All That Does Befall Us
by Thomas Walton

The World Is All That Does Befall Us is a book of mourning unlike any other. It is an extraordinary attempt to write about loss while resisting the sentimentality so common in memoirs about grief today. It weaves together various voices: the tender and the hostile, the sacred and the scatological, the solemn and the hysterical, the definitive and the confused. Walton plays these discordant elements against each other in an almost alchemical attempt to achieve the impossible: the end of grief, once and for all.

The World Is All That Does Befall Us is in conversation most directly with Gertrude Stein, but also canonical writers like Baudelaire, Wittgenstein, and Stevens, as well as current writers of memoir and the lyric essay such as Maggie Nelson, David Shields, Sarah Manguso, Elizabeth Cooperman, Erik Anderson, Richard Froude … (the list goes on, nearly forever!) The book is a challenge not to hide, whether in literary forms or easy wisdoms, but to devour grief, bite by bite, stanza by stanza, until it’s gone.

Thomas Walton is the author (with Elizabeth Cooperman) of The Last Mosaic (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2018). He is one of three editors of Make It True Meets Medusario (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2019), a bi-lingual poetry anthology, and author of the micro chapbook, A Name Is Just A Mane (Rinky Dink, 2016). His work has been published in numerous journals, including ZYZZYVA, Delmar, Bombay Gin, and others. He is founding editor of PageBoy Magazine and teaches math in Seattle.

Click here for the interview with Queen Mob’s Teahouse:  https://queenmobs.com/2019/10/vlad-interviews-thomas-walton/

Comments:

“Stein and John Prine and Baudelaire and Folsom Street Fair and hilarious true word origins and broken hearts and the weird wide world? This is a dream come true. It’s also, a book: The World Is All That Does Befall Us. Buy it, read it, and hold on for a ride with one of the liveliest reader-writer-thinkers around.” (Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body)

“Thomas Walton uses Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation as a shell that he inhabits in The World Is All That Does Befall Us. This allows him to move through a world both forgiving and painful after the breakup of his marriage.  The World Is All That Does Befall Us is a moving book, one bittersweet in its sadness and in its celebrations.” (Juliana Spahr, author of Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You)

Excerpt:

Are we separate now or unprepared, and if the latter, am I preparing us with this? Like some effigy, like some lamb.

‘Dis’ can also mean ‘opposite of.’ So if not prepared then postpared, meaning we are equipped now, after the fact.

Dis: apart, asunder, blizzard, storm!

….

In my dictionary Petrarch is pictured in profile wearing a hooded robe somewhat like a burka. He is incredibly ugly, which may explain the 800 sonnets. You would need that many to overcome such a mug.