Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems - Softcover

Komunyakaa, Yusef; McClung, Laren

 
9780374617646: Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0374617643 ISBN 13: 9780374617646
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

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.

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About the Author

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, The Emperor of Water Clocks, Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, The Chameleon Couch, Warhorses, Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. His plays, performance art, and librettos have been performed internationally and include Wakonda's Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. He teaches at New York University.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date
2026
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0374617643
ISBN 13 
9780374617646
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
240