ISBN 978-1-77126-148-7
$17.00 CDN/USA
96 pages
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 new forty-line poem (four ten-line stanzas where each of the four adopted lines are the last line of each stanza; lines six and nine must rhyme with line ten), 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. 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; the poetry world is about to get rocked. This is a book with a playlist: by the time Doda is finished, the glosa won’t know what hit it.