Thank you to Robert Priest, ECW Press Audio, and Netgalley for this audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the narrator of this work is actually the author! Robert Priest does a great job narrating his poetry. His voice is expressive without coming off as overly dramatic. I was engaged for the entirety of this read and ended up finishing it in one sitting. I am unfamiliar with the correct terms for certain poetry styles, but I enjoyed how Priest employed a certain rhythm or style that better communicates his words as he reads them.

As for the content itself, I was entertained from start to finish. His use of certain wordplay and repetition serve to get his message across in the easiest way possible. This was quite easy to digest and I hope to snag a physical copy down the line so that I may easily review some of the poems that I remember enjoying the most.

Interesting poems playing with language, religion, and expectations. There were a few gimmicks with common phrases that did have the shock of taking the expected and portraying it in a new light, but with repetition of the technique, the impact lessened. But I do like how Priest uses his lexical dexterity to point out uncomfortable things about faith.

Reading the Bible Backwards is an experimental poetry collection that has strong poems centered around how we see the Bible and how the Bible impacts societal worldviews. Exploring topics such as religion, love, and belief, the poetic style allows the reader to delve into transformative and contemplative thought through the use of engaging wordplay. The audiobook adds richness as the style and tempo assist the reader in both engaging and digesting the lyrical style and it’s rhythm. As both a pastor and a professor, this is a tool that I would use to engage both Bible and secular college students to enhance critical thought in religious and spiritual dialogues.

Reading the Bible Backwards is an experimental poetry collection that examines, dissects, and recreates Biblical and cultural narratives. It takes a serious look at how these narratives have impacted our society and asks questions about how they should impact our society.

Social conventions from religion to love to time are all put under the microscope, and Priest uses techniques like word replacement, especially relating to homophones and near-homophones. Wordplay is common in poetry, but Priest takes it to another level with some of the poems centered around wordplay as a concept.

Like most poetry collections, Reading the Bible Backwards has its ups and downs. It starts incredibly strong with poems centered directly on deconstructing Western ideas of religion. Then it slides back a little in the middle as more mundane aspects of society are examined, although not without a few gems. Then it comes back strong near the end with examinations of time, infinity, and love.

Throughout the collection, Priest maintains the experimental nature of the poetry, playing with different forms, formats, lengths, and styles. Sometimes, the turn of phrase is the entirety of the poem; other times, the poems are seemingly straightforward.

This collection is clearly worth a read. I've both read it and listened to the audiobook read by Priest himself, and both formats do justice to the poems on the page, although some of the homophone poems are more easily digested via text.

Reading the Bible Backwards by Robert Priest and read by the author is a collection of poetry with a unique perspective on how we see things. Priest is a literary poet in the tradition of Neruda and Mayakovsky, a composer of lush love poems, a singer-songwriter, a widely quoted aphorist, a children's poet, and novelist, Robert Priest is a mainstay of the literary/spoken word/music circuit both in Canada and abroad.

Brilliant, simply brilliant. Between Priest's lyrical style and a voice that pulls every twist out of the words, there is a fantastic synergy that is far greater than the sum of the parts. The initial subject matter may turn some readers off. Writing the New Testament in reverse or the story of Lot in reverse may seem something more in line with Anton LaVey; Priest manages to use the material to teach or instruct or provide a moral. It is something to see Lot's wife form from a pillar of salt and watch cities rise from destruction. On the other hand, he writes on the missing punctuation in the Bible, in particular, the question mark -- Thou shall not kill? Thou shall not steal?

Priest likes to change the perceptions we have been led to believe by changing one word for a very similar word -- sole for soul, angel and angle. In another poem, replacing the word children for bomb creates an entirely different response. In other poems, called meme splices, the reader will follow a familiar pattern of events until a twist is inserted.

His control of language is stunning. The rhythm, rhymes, and alliteration are used sparingly but to great effect. Having the poet read his own work offers the added advantage of the writer using his own voice inflections to highlight what he thought was most important or his meaning that is slightly hidden in words alone. One line that jumped out at me was:

Unleash the Dogs of Poetry
On the murderers of language.

"Bucket List"

It is an excellent set of lines, and even more so as the author's voice seemed to emulate the late Jim Morrison.

This collection knocks at defiance's door. Even the book cover that shows the vinyl album with the book's title is reminiscent of the backward masking. If you play an album backward, you will hear a Satanic message; what happens when you play the Bible backward. Can anything good come from it? Also interesting is that part of the book was paid for by the Canadian equivalent of the National Endowment of the Arts. My thoughts were of the Maplethrope and the uproar over using tax dollars for "offensive art" or even a censorship test like Ginsberg and other authors. My thoughts of this vanished when Priest turned to love poems and ended with the song "The Bomb in Reverse." Priest is not trying to create controversy but instead deliver a message and encourage the reader to think. Reading the Bible Backwards has to be one of the most enjoyable poetry collections I have read in quite some time. There is just enough rebellion to keep it on edge and a writing style that captures the reader. Outstanding.

In most poetry collections I usually only like a handful of peoms and detest the rest, but this was a solid book of poetry. I liked almost all of these peoms and really loved several others. I also really enjoyed, and wasn't expecting, the song at the end. I did find that I enjoyed the song better when I played it faster at 2x speed, but I'm also a fast listener when it comes to audiobooks, so that could just be me.