Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems

By Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374617643
• ISBN13: 9780374617646
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"