In Glutton for Punishment, Christopher Doda updates an ancient poetic form for the 21st century. The glosa is an old metrical form from the royal Spanish court system where a poet takes four lines from another poet and uses them to create a forty-line poem of his own (four ten-line stanzas where each of the four adopted lines are the last line of each stanza) allowing the poet to pay tribute to, converse or argue with the other poet. Doda's variation on this classic form is to take all the source lines from hard rock and heavy metal lyrics, pushing the musicality of poems and the poetry of rock to its limits, while always forced to keep the beat. As rock stars are the poets of the new century, this book is timely and international in scope, as Doda has used lyrics from bands in Canada and the United States to Iraq to most of Europe and the United Kingdom. This is a book with a playlist: hard core glosa for the new age.

Christopher Doda is a poet and an award winning critic living in Toronto. His first book of poems, Among Ruins (2001), was released by Mansfield Press; he is an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly.

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