THE SALT OF THE UNIVERSE

Essays that explore fundamentalism, nature, music, and wombats.

In Leach’s third collection, the “overchurched” former Seventh-day Adventist seeks to “let my soul speak for itself.” Featuring a kind of choppy, often rambling comic approach, the author prefers wit, humor, and sarcasm while making her points. In “The Answer Book,” she lambastes the Adventists (“prophecy cranks”) and their world-will-end-tomorrow beliefs: “while the apocalypse is sexy short-term, long-term it’s a slog.” A later essay, “Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It,” is Leach’s exuberant defense for being a vegetarian while swiping at fellow vegetarian Ellen White, the Adventists’ co-founder and author of countless commandments, including “cheese should never be introduced into the human stomach.” In “The Apicklypse,” the author chronicles her gradual call to freedom from Adventism. In the less strident second section, Leach returns to topics explored in her first two collections: nature and animals. “Old Hat” is a discourse on flowers, trees, cows, the meaning of Christmas, and enjoying a “dance to birdsong.” “Lucky Duck” provides a list of some of the “characters” who live in the author’s Montana neighborhood, from bears to chickens to moose. In “Laughing Willows,” Leach asks us to stop and consider the willows, which “look like wrestlers.” In Part 3, the author takes on the concept of rapture, object permanence, and “insipid” contemporary Christian music. In one of the book’s best essays, the musically gifted Leach feels inhabited by “phantoms, lightning, mazurkas, mice” while playing the piano or violin. “Salt Is Good” angrily recalls how, as students, they were ordered to tear out the first few pages of their biology book “to protect ourselves from encountering evolution. We canceled evolution.” Each essay ends with a sort of footnoted “reprise” in which Leach briefly riffs on topics previously covered.

An uneven collection with just a few more misses than hits.