Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems

Laren McClung,Yusef Komunyakaa,Yusef Komunyakaa
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
February 17 2026
EAN: 9780374617646
ISBN: 0374617643
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Synopsis:

A witty and searching collaborative poetic work composed during the pandemic.

Let's go back far as we dare
to go back to that land bridge
made of untrusting earth & ice,

to a boorish faith in our rhythm
of footsteps, the fleeting mantra
of wordless dreams . . .

So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. The result is a work that is at once a document of the poets' inner and outer worlds and also a single and singular vision of what it is to live now and to look back on the epic scale of human history and artistic expression that stretches over millennia.