Michael William Palmer, Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs: Non-Fiction. Bauhan Publishing, 2020
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction (I know, my loss), but have been wanting to pick up Michael Palmer’s debut book in part because I like Michael a lot (disclosure), and in part because, in quarantine here in Western New York, I miss Utah, its colors, smells, peaks; I knew Baptizing the Dead would contain a healthy dose of the natural world. There are a few things I really love about this book. First, I love how this book is closest to memoir, but its 1st person narrator (putatively Michael) doesn’t spend too much time inside his interior. It feels right to me, here, with the narrator exploring/struggling with his LDS background, as well as how that intersects with sex, love, and family, that the narrator keeps it fairly (and beautifully written) simple, insofar as we are given the actions and reactions, and are left to roil around with the complexity of his life; a complexity that accretes from story to story. It’s got a certain iceberg-theory sensibility that sometimes I dislike; here I love. And still, I like it even better when the narrative fractures against the less linear forms the book sometimes employs; as if the narrator’s life is the ship which is wrecked against the jetty, its forms expelled and sharded through the fragmented glossaries the book sometimes favors. Okay, that was a super mixed metaphor, but still – this is a book well, well worth reading.