The World Is All That Does Befall Us

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.