Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems - Softcover

Komunyakaa, Yusef; McClung, Laren

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

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