2 out of 4 stars
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This is a review of Bible Believers Poetry by Zoe Pinckney.
Bible Believers Poetry by Zoe Pinckney is exactly what it sounds like - a collection of poetry that's made for Christians. The book is broken up into four sections: Bible Believers Series, Plain Christian Poetry Series, Spirit-Filled Lovers Series and Women Scorned Series. The first two sections speak of religion more generally and have the most thematic wiggle-room, while the Spirit-Filled Lovers Series is full of passionate love poems that have God as the object of that love. The Women Scorned Series is the most unique of the four, focusing on Zoe and women in general being wronged by men and lust. There are just over 25 poems altogether, and it was great to have the variety in subject matter while still having the poems kept together in their own sections.
It's always great to see a poet experiment with different forms of poetry. Even in a smaller poetry collection like this, Zoe managed to play with different rhyming schemes, text layouts and even font color! The fact that each poem changed it up a bit made it so that it never got repetitive which was really refreshing in a poetry collection. Between this and the fact that each section was rather short, it makes this a collection that's easy to read through without being weighed down by repetition.
Unfortunately, the consistency of the poem quality wasn't very solid. The poems are united through the theme of God and even some phrases that are used in more than one poem, and while several of the poems were quite excellent, this can't be said of them all. A couple of my least favorite poems actually kick off the collection which had me really concerned about the book when I started. There are some that I enjoyed quite a bit, like Family or Fantasy that talks about Zoe's real life ("My eyes are dark brown/My body‘s some-what round") and Solid Love in which Zoe discusses God's love and how enriching and fulfilling it can be ("No leaks, no holes/No turmoil in their souls/No lying, no crying/No good things denying"). There were also others that weren't so great, however, and almost every poem (even my favorites) had at least one point I stumbled on a bit either due to flow, forced rhyme, grammatical errors or just not quite grasping what was meant (or perhaps the line was so forced it didn't mean anything after all). I'm a Christian, but not very familiar with the Bible so it's very possible there were references I didn't catch.
Although I did like several of the poems, there were just too many that still needed work and grammatical errors in poetry are unforgivable. As such, I'm rating Bible Believers Poetry by Zoe Pinckney 2 out of 4 stars. With some polish this could be a 3 star collection, and some of Zoe's lines and rhymes are really excellent, but those pieces are just too few and far between. Other Christians, especially those who know the Bible well, should check this one out nonetheless!
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Bible Believers Poetry
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